


Belief is a beautiful armor, but makes for the heaviest sword

by tattooalecki



Series: Belief Verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brotherly Love, Codependency, Cross season fic, Dean very much not, Denial is the way to go, Love, M/M, Pining, Sam Winchester believing in angels, Sam and Dean are soulmates, Sam/Dean - Freeform, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Wincest - Freeform, a+ parenting John Winchester, and for good reason, long fic, slight AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:42:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 68,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27915466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tattooalecki/pseuds/tattooalecki
Summary: Dean Winchester doesn't believe in Angels. God, Angels, they're just stories folks tell themselves to get through the day, to expunge themselves of their sins. But when Dean is twelve years old he gets a mark, a singular word on his wrist: 'Angel'. A soulmate mark, according to his father John. The gift of knowing how your soulmate will die. A curse, a secret, and as time progresses, a seemingly false lead. Angels don't exist, so the mark must be wrong. That's what Dean thinks anyway, that is until Castiel turns up, a bonified Angel of the lord, and Dean's entire world turns on its head. As Angels and Demons spout about the duality of the Winchester sibling's souls, Dean realises that the mark must be about Sam, and resolves to do whatever it takes to protect him against the mark's prophecy. This story takes us across the seasons as Dean tries to protect Sam from a litany of Angelic threats and has to make endless decisions to put Sam in the path of an Angel's mercy. It takes us along as Dean fights with the ever cementing knowledge that the more their lives revolve around these Angelic warriors, the more his soulmate is in danger. Oh, and the kicker? Sam knows none of this. He just thinks Deanreallyhates Angels.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: Belief Verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044114
Comments: 28
Kudos: 38





	1. The mark of the end

**December, 1991**

Dean got the mark when he was twelve years old. He had been running drills with John, sweat clinging to his kid skinny collarbones and kicked up mud making its home on the backs of his shaking thighs, when the sore and tacky skin of his left wrist, previously bound by John in an escape drill, began to burn. It was mid-December, not close enough to Christmas to be truly nauseating, but not far enough away that the shops of the drive through mom and pop town they were in wasn’t decorating everything in tinsel and pine.

Dean remembered how Sammy had watched the blare of twinkling Christmas nights through the Impala’s back window as they’d rolled into town, wonder and excitement warring blatantly on his eight-year-old face. Dean knew Sam didn’t know anything about hunting and monsters, not really, and he wanted to keep it that way, let him enjoy those Christmas festivities for just a while longer. Innocence was a gift that Dean had never been given, had never even been a consideration for him, and so Dean felt extremely strongly about Sammy being kept in that childhood bubble for as long as possible.

It hadn’t snowed yet and so John was adamant that Dean get in as many miles as he could before the night was out. Dean knew though that even if it snowed he would still be made to run and it would turn into an endurance test, a challenge. As desperate as Dean was to please his father, he really didn’t want to run five miles soaked up to the thigh in damp grit harsh snow, icy sludge pounded up at him by cars racing along the roadside that hugged the forest he was training in.

“Dean, pick up the pace!” barked John, his voice carrying from the Impala where he drove lazily, leisurely, alongside the forest Dean ran through.

Dean ignored the itch on his wrist, gave it a furious scratch with jagged too short nails and then launched himself into a harder pelt. His breath beat itself out of his mouth, curling into smoke tendrils as it left his bleached lips, their color lost from exertion. His body ached, his feet felt like lumps of concrete and his head throbbed with cold, hunger and determination.

He glanced sideways as he ran and saw the bob of a shaggy brown head in the back of the Impala: Sam.

Sam was too young for drills, even if John did make him run laps from time to time. Sam wasn’t a naturally energetic kid, didn’t opt for sports or team games at whatever school John dumped them in, and was more content reading, curled up with a book and his homework. Dean’s breath punched him repeatedly as he pelted the earthy forest floor beneath him, his ankle twisting dangerously on a rocky outcrop as he kept his gaze trained on Sammy instead of the route ahead.

“Dean” John called, a warning.

Sam looked up then, his hazel eyes distracted by the world of The Famous Five before he spotted Dean. His dimples popped out and he smiled, lifted up a pack of battered playing cards to the Impala’s window for Dean to see. Dean’s wrist throbbed as he grinned right back; Sam had been teaching himself to play, wanting something for them to do together on their endless time on the road. Damn, he loved his brother sometimes, when he wasn’t being a stubborn pain in the ass.

With Sammy’s nod of encouragement, Dean refocused his gaze and pushed his over exerted limbs until he couldn’t see the Impala anymore. It gave him an odd thrill to suddenly not see the sleek burning black of the Impala behind him, the shadowy figure of his bearded dead eyed father at the wheel. Even at twelve years old, Dean knew what his life would be. He knew he was chained to a life of monsters, guns, rock salt and misery. He never hoped for anything else, had learned early on that to hope was to think there was any other viable option than what he already had, and he knew there wasn’t.

The only thing that kept him going was Sammy, his baby brother with his scuffed converse up on the Impala’s back seat, no doubt driving John mad with the way he rubbed plastic soles against the leather upholstery. Sam was his, had been since John had put him in his arms seven and a half years ago, his tiny four-year-old hands clammy and burned with soot but with his baby brother, his baby Sam, safe inside his shaking too small arms.

Dean would do anything for him, and he hoped Sam knew that. He thought he did, the way Sam clung to him like a limpet after a nightmare or the way Sam had the audacity to puppy dog eye him until he got the last bowl of cereal. Dean was such a pushover for Sam, cared for him in ways John had never cared for him.

“You did good, son” John patted Dean’s muscle strained arm when Dean finally climbed into the backseat of the Impala three hours later, collapsing shakily next to Sam.

“Yessir” Dean breathed, his hands quaking as he tried to undo a bottle of water.

Sammy undid it for him and Dean quirked his lips in a smile of gratitude before downing the entire bottle and chucking the plastic to the footwell, another bottle in his palm before he even had to ask.

“Thanks, Sammy”

“It’s okay” Sam shrugged, matter of fact, pointed nose drawn back into the works of Enid Blyton before Dean could get another word in.

Dean let him be, didn’t want to deal with petulant brother syndrome while he was dead on his feet. There was nothing worse than a prissy Sam, and Dean was in no mood to be a mediator between him and Dad. Dean’s eyes fell shut and he let the lullaby of Metallica’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ escort him into the only peace he ever got: a good blackout sleep.

When they got back to the motel, Dean was jolted into wakefulness by Sam’s small hand whacking him impatiently. Sam had one hell of a swing on him and Dean groaned in aggravation, turned his body away from his brother and attempted to cling back onto the back of Mistress Sleep.

“Dean! come on, we’re here, Dad’s gone in already and he said you’ve gotta have a shower. You stink”

Dean swore under his breath, a colorful enough term for a twelve-year-old, and then glared over his mud caked shoulder at Sam.

“You’d stink too if you’d just run 10k. Now quit bein’ a butthead, why’d you not go in already? you need to be escorted in, princess?”

Sam’s expression darkened and his mouth knotted up into a ball, his dimples flatlining as his jousting disappeared.

“You’re a jerk. I was waiting for you; thought you’d want a hand. You know what? just forget it. Get yourself out”

Sam swung his legs round and cranked open the Impala’s heavy door, the bracing cold December air hitting Dean like a bucket of icy water. In the same second, Dean’s hand immediately flew out and grabbed Sam’s wrist, his tiny bird boned wrist, and Dean clamped down until he felt them squeak.

“Come on, don’t be like that” he said, softer this time, none of the adult bravado he knew Sam hated spilling from his lips.

Sammy had a real thing about Dean sounding like dad; hated it with a passion that had Sam teary eyed in frustration at Dean when Dean said something too pessimistic, too old or just plain crude. Sam had the hope that neither of the other Winchester men had, and Dean envied him for it. Sam had such faith, such determination. He was a ball of sparking quivering light that Dean knew he could never hold on to for too long lest it burn him to a nub. Dean would let him though, would let Sam take everything he had, everything he was, if he wanted it.

Dean knew this was his lot in life. His only miniscule thought of another life had been being a firefighter, to emulate those who put out the fire that ravaged their mother Mary on the ceiling over half a decade ago. But honestly, if he could be enveloped in the heat and smoke of Sam’s life instead? He wouldn’t want to extinguish that.

He didn’t need much, not Dean. Just a gun, and his brother.

“Come on, Sammy” Dean tried again, dull smile tugging at his lips.

“I’ll take a shower and we can play cards; saw you were practisin’ earlier”

Sam’s head turned slowly toward his brother; his vulnerability clear in the hopeless devotion Dean saw there. Sam just wanted to be loved, connected to, he just wanted a friend and a Mom, some normalcy. Dean guessed he fit all those roles, except the normalcy, but he could try his hand at it, but only for Sam, only ever for Sam.

“You’re not too tired?” Sam hedged, his lower lip worrying between his teeth.

“Nah” Dean shrugged, hauling himself up behind Sam, next in line to climb out the Impala.

He made a point of connecting his chest to Sam’s sloped skinny back. Heat against heat, body against body. Brother against brother. He felt Sam’s breath skitter out of him in relief and Sam finally smiled again, dimples winking at Dean as they reappeared.

“Move your ass, Sammy. Come on, there’s still chilli in the fridge from yesterday and I’m starving. We can use those saltines I stole from that diner a few states back, give it some crunch. Sound good, huh?”

It did sound good, and Sam’s stomach rumbled at the idea of the warming spices and filling meat and beans as he scooted out the Impala and made way for Dean to drag his muddy, frozen body out of the back seat.

Sam immediately went under Dean’s arm, didn’t even ask, and helped his brother back into the motel they were staying at, his shorter knees banging against Dean’s bent ones as Dean stooped to kick his boots off before stepping inside.

It wasn’t much warmer inside the motel and Dean grit his teeth together to stop them chattering as he passed the blast of a cold air unit on his way to the bathroom. The motel was gaudy, owners obviously wanting to create the atmosphere of a bayou swamp with all the sagging brown ruffles and variations of snot, scum and puke green on the carpets, curtains, furniture and appliances.

Dean wondered if any amount of Christmas red would make the green look festive, or whether it would just make it look like someone had added cherry tomatoes to their cobb salad.

Sam let Dean shower the grime of the nights drill off, only letting go of him when he was sure Dean had the sturdiness of his bandy legs beneath him and could use the frame of the bathroom door for support. After that Sam backed off, slipped his jacket off and immediately went to go heat up the chilli. Dean usually did the cooking but he had at least taught Sam how to use a microwave, and if they were lucky, a working gas stove. Dean was quietly relieved and thankful that Sam had taken control of dinner that night: he wasn’t feeling so hot even aside from the ragged tiredness of doing drills.

He’d felt like he’d been fighting off getting sick for days now, ignoring how his stomach churned over diner burgers and pie in a way it would usually be fine with. Dean didn’t get sick, couldn’t afford it, especially if John decided to skip town and leave him alone with Sammy again. John was reasonably good at not doing it too often, reminding Dean that this was a luxury that would not extend beyond him turning thirteen, and so it was a rare occurrence that John would leave his eight-year-old in the hands of his twelve-year-old.

But then again, if John got a lead, that could be it. The yellowed eyed demon that killed Mom was all he saw, thought about and obsessed over, and Dean knew he and Sam were second, third and perhaps even tenth place behind all the hunting mania John had in his worn and fractured mind.

Listening to the sound of the microwave whirring round, Dean stripped off his sweats, boxers, overshirt and jersey and kicked them as far away from himself as he feasibly could. The bathroom was tiny; barely a room and more of a closet. The shower was lime scaled and grey in its grouting, shower curtain long gone. The bottom of the tiny square stand in shower unit hit the edge of the toilet almost immediately so if he had really wanted, and if he had good enough aim, Dean could’ve peed straight from the shower and into the toilet bowl.

The sink was attached at the hip to the toilet and above it a brown freckled mirror so scratched and scuffed that Dean could only just make out his teeth when he brushed them in the morning, his shoulder and hip glued up against Sam’s, mirroring the same tight close quarters as the bathroom amenities.

Dean knew the hot water was scarce in the pipes and he wasn’t greedy (no matter how badly he wanted to be), so he washed himself soldier style, quick all over, soap for shampoo, rub your nails into your scalp and don’t forget behind the ears and between your toes: nothing worse than bacterial infections. Got out within two minutes. His skin steamed pink as he grabbed two hand towels and fisted them to dry his body, shivering and cursing as goose bumps assaulted his flesh.

“God, fuck, it’s cold” he grunted.

And that’s when he saw it.

Frowning, Dean tilted his wrist left and right, up and down, even looked at it upside down for clarity. He even tried shaking it off, hoping the mark would fly off his skin and disappear with the frozen dankness of the night’s run. Heart beating faster, Dean pressed the thumb of his right hand against the sharp tendons of his left wrist, over the word that was now stained into his skin.

“What the hell- “

Dean wasn’t dumb, knew it had to be a curse of some sort, and he immediately threw himself into checking the miniature bathroom for hex bags. Then, when that came up negative, his own body, searching for marks, cuts, strange colors or hell, even a new freckle.

Zilch.

Dean dug his nails into the writing that had suddenly cemented itself upon his skin, just one word.

‘Angel’

It created a stark contrast against the pale freckles of his wrist, tendons straining in tension against the bridge of his skin.

It looked like a tattoo, but written in fleshy skin colored ink, made out of the atoms of Dean’s own skin than a separate substance. When Dean tilted his wrist it glinted, shiny and gossamer as a new scar. Dean had been trained to control his emotions, had been told time and time again not to panic, to take whatever came at him in his stride. However, Dean had never been trained for what to do when a strange word suddenly branded itself onto your body.

Angel. Like real angels? Dean stared at the word some more, his heart beat palpable in his ears, water dampening his naked shoulders from his hair, too long in the back and overdue for a trim. Dean idly realised he hadn’t bought any clean clothes into the bathroom and that he would have to call out to Sam, somehow hide the mark and act as if he wasn’t freaking out.

He didn’t believe in angels, and he had no reason to. Mary, Mom, she had believed in angels, had decorated their family home in Lawrence with them, had told Dean angels were watching over him. But where had those angels been when she’d burned on the ceiling of Sam’s nursery? Gash on her stomach, bleeding onto her new-borns head, mouth torn open in unimaginable horror. No, Dean didn’t believe in any higher power other than his father, and even that belief was shaky at best.

Sam perhaps, being the only other thing Dean believed in. But Sam, he was real, Dean could hold him and touch him, smell his fruity kids shampoo and see with his own eyes as Sam went from dimpled laugh to deep seated scowl in the space of two seconds. Sam was cemented in Dean’s reality, was a truth he could not unknow, but angels? Dad said they didn’t exist: that only the things that slithered and bit and growled in the dark were of happenstance. Dean had never seen any evidence to the contrary, and he knew he was only a drop in the ocean of hunters before him, that his dad wasn’t the first man to go rogue after the supernatural took their loved one.

If there were angels, someone would’ve documented it, said something? If there were angels wouldn’t they have put a stop to all the horrific things happening on earth? If angels existed, surely, they wouldn’t be cruel enough to sit back and watch as humans ripped each other to shreds and monsters gnashed their teeth, laughing with delight. And if angels existed...what about God?

God had never been on Dean’s radar, apart from church as an infant where he had sat at Mary’s feet, playing with the pew cushion, tugging at its tassels and looking up to see his mother, blonde hair glowing ethereally in the warmth cascading through the stained-glass windows of the church. Dean had never found religion, had never had a reason to. The monsters that waited behind his eyelids made sure of that.

“Dean? you alright in there?”

Dad’s voice behind the door, gruff with tiredness and growing impatience.

Dean swallowed thickly, rubbed his hair dry with the abrasive hand towels he had at his disposal and then, angling his body behind the door, flicked the lock.

“Hey, uh, can you get my clothes? didn’t bring any in”

John looked exasperated, eyes rolling slightly, but he went away and came back a moment later, his old Led Zeppelin tee shirt in his hand, the one he’d gifted Dean for his birthday, accompanied by some fresh sweats.

“Here” John grunted, shoving the clothes through the gap in the bathroom door and beginning to move away, shoulders sloped and his face haggard, the look of a man barely functioning beyond utility.

“Uh, Dad- gimme, gimme a second, wanna show you something”

“It’s called puberty, son” John half turned, his mouth pulling back in a tired grin, an attempt at a joke.

Dean heard Sam laugh and he glared at the space where he presumed his brother was, curled up eating chilli, not a care in the world.

“Not that!” Dean hissed, disgusted by the insinuation.

“Are you sure?” John smirked.

“Yes! God! just- wait!” Dean snapped, slammed the door closed and tugged his fresh clothes on with his cheeks burning hot as flame.

He wrenched back open the door when he was done and beckoned John in, his eyes wide and his heart beating a tempo in his chest.

John very reluctantly crammed himself into the closet of a bathroom, leant against the cheap creaking door and peered down at his son, eyesight going crossed with Dean so close to him.

Dean felt tiny in comparison to his dad, his slim muscles of boyhood nothing to the bulk of John Winchester, still wearing his leather jacket and with a three-day shadow working its way to the dark side of stubble on his chin.

“Well?” John huffed.

“Come on, Sammy’s waitin’ on you, been bitchin’ already about having to wait to eat that chilli, says you got some magic crackers or somethin’ ”

Dean immediately felt bad, Sam not having eaten, waiting for him, waiting for the promise he’d made in the Impala to be fulfilled. Sam was so loyal it made Dean’s heart ache but that loyalty would only get him disappointed. There was no way Sam would ever see Dean that way forever, would realise before too long how Dean was making it up as he went, how he was just scared and witless, wasn’t smart or talented, was only built to hold a gun and shoot.

“Something…something’s happened” Dean said slowly, immediately regretting his words when he saw John’s eyes narrow, his marine’s gaze scouring Dean for injury or upset.

“I’m fine” Dean rushed to say “just- look” he held out his wrist toward his father, fingers curled as John took his wrist in his large hands and read the word imprinted there.

John’s face was unreadable for approximately twenty seconds and Dean’s blood pressure spiked, his face paling so much his freckles looked like white washed stucco splashed with brown graphite, irregular and jarring.

“It’s a soulmate mark” John said after a beat, his eyes searching Dean’s face for recognition before continuing.

“It’s a warning. I had one with your mom, but I didn’t know what it was ‘til afterward, thought I’d just got drunk and got a tattoo when drinkin’”

“A warning?” Dean croaked, leaning heavily against the jut of the porcelain sink behind him, face now turning as awful a green as the motel plumbing.

“A soulmate mark? I don’t have a soulmate; I don’t know anyone- “

“Dean” John warned, and Dean fell silent.

“It…it tells you how they’re gonna die” Dean’s stomach churned at the look John levelled at him, pain filled and knowing.

“Your mom…I got a mark when we were datin’, just said ‘fire’, didn’t think anything of it like I said, thought it was a dumbass mistake. Turns out the mistake was ignorin’ it…coulda saved her life”

John shook his head, bought his calloused hands to his lips and bowed his temple to rest against the worn and blemished gold of his wedding ring. Dean listened mutely, his stomach rolling as he watched his father remember his mother. They never talked about Mom, not ever, she was sacred and to utter her name was as sacrilege.

“No… it wasn’t your fault, you know that, Dad. It was the demon, remember? the one we’re hunting, we’re gonna find it” Dean said, desperation to see the strength of John Winchester returning shaking his voice.

He couldn’t be strong about this unless John was. He couldn’t tell Sammy, would just make him worry, so it was the two of them, banded together by the possibility of heartbreak for another generation of Winchester.

Seemingly reminded of himself by Dean’s words, John quirked a sad bottomless pit of a smile and slapped a hand to Dean’s shoulder, the contact making Dean flinch hard enough that the faucet of the sink behind him dug into his coccyx.

“You’re a good kid, Dean. You’ll be alright, Winchester men always are. We’re made of a tougher stuff, you an’ me”

Dean tried to return his father’s smile but it turned sour on his lips and bled downward, his gaze tumbling down to stare at the scarred blemish now on his wrist, seemingly forever, or until his ‘soulmate’ died by…an angel? None of this made sense. Maybe their name was going to be angel? Sounded like a porn star’s name if you asked Dean, like those movies Dad watched when he was sure his boys were asleep in their shared motel bed, but at least one of them wasn’t.

“Here” John said, breaking the silence like the crack of a whip.

Dean looked up to the press of John’s fingers against his own, pushing a watch into his palm. Dad’s watch, an adult watch, black and sturdy with dials and two clock faces: one for the real time and the other for something Dean wasn’t sure what.

“Wear it, cover that up, make it easier to ignore” John instructed when Dean looked confused, his fingers smoothing the plastic surface of the watch over and over.

Did he want to ignore it? Was that really what was best? He was shocked, partially, to discover that John was so graciously calm about this. Did he not see how huge this was? And if he’d had one too and had lost Mom because of it, he knew how horrific it could turn out to be.

Dean frowned, his stomach flipping in discomfort as his father helped him secure the black band round his skinny boned wrist, tightened the band to the setting that nipped at Dean’s skin uncomfortably tight.

“I don’t want you thinkin’ about this, Dean. Angels don’t exist, y’hear me? this isn’t gonna happen, and I will make sure it doesn’t. Whatever this is, we can avoid it. Just focus on the plan, on the demon, and it’ll all be alrigh’”

Dean held John’s gaze, feeling like he was missing something, like they’d just skipped to the end of the story or thrown the book skittering across the floorboards, last pages ripped out and burned before he could know what befell the characters.

John looked intensely back at him, nostrils flared, eyes on the wrong side of sincere.

“Dean- “ he warned.

“But-” Dean started and yelped when John’s fist came down onto the ceramic beside him, the mirror above it fracturing and splintering into the stained and rusted sink.

“Drop it” John said, gravel and death commanding his tone.

Dean, skinny as he was broad and very much his father’s second in command, retreated. Dropped his chin to his chest, let the watch rub his marked skin the wrong way and let nauseous worry worm its way into his gut.

“Yessir” he mumbled, stepping back so John could turn in the cramped interior of the bathroom, put his hand on the door knob and pretend like everything was fine, normal. The Winchester way.

“Dean?” Dean looked up at his father’s back, worn butter soft leather tight across his muscular shoulders, his dark eyes meeting Dean’s green over his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell Sam” John said: firm and resolute, no room for discussion.

His dark gaze bore into Dean’s and wouldn’t release him until Dean nodded once more, his neck spongy and disconnected to his vertebrae at the effort it took him to move it up and down and not across side to side.

Dean hadn’t been going to tell Sam anyway, wouldn’t have dreamed of telling his eight-year-old baby brother about something as ridiculously foreign as soulmates and death omens. Sam had been getting suspicious about John for months now anyway, perhaps even a year: he didn’t need more ammo to dig deeper. He was such a smart kid, had blown through his pre-K reading and onto big books before he was even four, had been able to recite the alphabet backward at five and now at eight could recite Pi to whatever thousandth of a place he wanted.

Sam was a genius, a rapid-fire bundle of intelligence and smarts whom Dean could never hope to catch up with. He could never even hope to be on his little brother’s level and Dean was proud of Sam in the way he knew John should be, but he would never tell Sam that.

He looked after Sam, sure, but he couldn’t handle that gooey chick flick stuff, at least not too often: seeing Sammy look at him with his big hazel eyes and dimpled smile, looking at him like he hung the moon and the stars: it hurt more than it felt good.

Sam had started asking questions, about mom, about what dad did, about why they moved around all the time, and Dean begged Sammy to quit asking, to stop, telling him he didn’t wanna know, that it was best he didn’t. But Sam, he was so stubborn, and Dean knew that by the time the year was out Sam would’ve figured it out, would’ve worn him down and learned the truth. God, Dean didn’t want Sam to know anything. He wanted to protect him, keep him pure and naïve and as good as any normal person out on the street.

So no, Dean wouldn’t tell Sam. He wouldn’t dream of it. He didn’t need his Dad to tell him what was best for Sammy: he already did that himself daily, looking after him, making sure he brushed his hair and teeth and stopped reading long enough for Dean to shove some grub in his mouth. Dean was a pro at looking after Sam: had literally been born into it.

John took Dean’s silent nod for acquisition and with one last grunted look at his son, opened the bathroom door and disappeared into the noxious green of their motel room, the heat that had been trapped inside the closet sized bathroom puffing out into the main room and dissipating once it hit the cold stream of air coming from the air conditioning unit.

Dean adjusted the watch over his wrist, _Angel, Angel, Angel_ , and finally moved out the bathroom himself, pale toes freezing once the soles of his feet hit the cold of the questionably stained carpet. Not looking at Sam, Dean retrieved a clean grey hoodie from his duffel, a pair of holey socks, and the saltines for their dinner.

Dean could feel Sam’s eyes on him, could tell how his brother tracked him as he moved: questioning, wide eyed and wanting to know what had happened in that bathroom. Dean wouldn’t tell him, couldn’t, so he didn’t rise to the bait. Sam knew how to worm his way into Dean’s psyche, turn him inside out and decode the inscriptions on Dean’s bones. Sam knew Dean in ways Dean didn’t even know himself, and that terrified him, that someone so small could see him so plainly when Dean couldn’t even look into the mirror without seeing a stranger: a boy with a man’s weight on his fledgling shoulders.

“Here” Dean chucked the saltines at Sam quietly, hoisted himself up onto the bed he was sharing with Sam.

“What took so long? your foods gone cold” Sam commented slyly, voice low and hushed, keeping their conversation private from their father.

Sam opened the saltine packets and shook one over his uneaten, now unquestionably cold chilli, before emptying another packet on top of Dean’s own portion.

John glanced across the room at Dean, his eyes a dark gash of unspoken direction: don’t tell Sam.

Dean swallowed, lowered his gaze and grabbed his chilli with both hands, went to tug his sleeve down over the lump of his new watch. Sam watched him, always watching, and frowned: his hazel eyes confused. He didn’t understand why Dean wouldn’t tell him: why nobody told him anything he truly wanted to know.

“Gotta rash, must’ve run into some ivy or somethin’” Dean mumbled, bought his chilli to his lips and began to eat, big mouthfuls and slurps that left Sam looking disgusted: effectively cutting off whatever retort Sam had to have had lined up.

They ate their chilli in tense silence, Sam stewing beside Dean and Dean making a humanitarian effort to laugh at the Scooby Doo cartoons on the TV and act as though nothing had happened.

Dean’s mind kept racing though, didn’t let up for a second. Soulmate mark. His father’s dismissal, his insistence that Dean didn’t tell Sam, the way Dean could tell there was more to that than his father’s concern for his youngest’s wellbeing.

Dad didn’t even care if Sam knew about hunting, was only waiting because Dean convinced him to not to tell him. There was therefore no way that dad had developed some sudden nurturing and caring attitude that kept him from telling Sam about the mark; no, that wasn’t even remotely possible. Dad didn’t do caring in the way other parents did: did it instead with back pats and food in your belly, made sure you had somewhere to sleep and that you knew how to load a weapon.

Action, not reaction.

Dad had been all ready to tell Sam about hunting on his third birthday, said he was old enough to know, needed to know what was out there in the dark, preying on him, needed to know to be careful: that being told to look both ways when crossing the street and not talk to strangers was the kinda crap that helped nobody.

Dean had begged, pleaded, bargained, done anything he could. Please dad, please, come on, look at him, he’s not ready. Dean had barely turned seven himself, but he couldn’t do it. Sam had been drawing with some stolen crayons from a diner they’d eaten at that day, doodling on scraps of newspaper that John had disregarded for a hunt. Sam had drawn a rainbow, only been able to color with red, blue, yellow and green due to the coloring box’s limited offerings, but he’d been so proud of himself, had shown Dean with a smile that lit up the entire room.

Dean couldn’t do it, couldn’t let dad do it. Couldn’t let the kid that drew rainbows, who laughed when birds circled in the sky, who sang busted ass nursery rhymes mixed up with Mosher rock, know what the world was really like. He wanted Sam to be a kid, to not have to check over his shoulder, to not worry that one day John really wouldn’t come back from a hunt and they’d be well and truly alone.

Dean knew nothing about soulmates, nothing apart from what rom coms and Hallmark Christmas movies on grainy cable had taught him. He presumed they were romantic, because his parents had been them, but he really had no clue. If anyone was ever going to be his soulmate, the only person he could ever think of was Sam. Sam was the only person, apart from Dad, that Dean would ever want to do anything drastic for; the only person he cared about, loved and adored more than he knew what to do with.

Shooting John a sideways glance, Dean wondered if this was what his dad had been thinking. That it had to be Sam, that’s why they couldn’t tell him, couldn’t let him know that the other half of his soul was his own brother. Dean immediately felt dirty, disturbed. No, it couldn’t always be romantic, right? otherwise if it was Sam the mark referred to, something was really and truly wrong with him. Maybe it was Sam, but in a familial loyalty way, or maybe it was some girl he’d never met yet. He was only twelve, after all.

After an hour or so inside his own head, Dean realised Sam had fallen asleep beside him, tiny frame curled into him, unsocked feet pinked from cold and his breaths puffing out furls of heat into the below standard temperature of their motel room. Dean let himself watch his brother, exploring the idea that this mark could be about him, that an angel could take Sammy away from him. It felt right, if he didn’t think about it too hard that was, about the connotations of the word ‘soulmate’ and all that could potentially entail.

He’d always protected Sam; this was just another thing to protect him from. If Dean was going to spend his entire life fighting monsters, and he knew he was, then adding one more to the mix wasn’t a big deal, especially if it was for Sam. As much as John did this hunting job for Mary, and as much as Dean tried to convince himself he was doing it for Mom too, Dean knew deep down it was really for his brother, to give him a better world to grow up, and hopefully grow old in.

Moving carefully, Dean took off his own socks and pulled them onto Sam’s icy toes, manoeuvring his clingy little brother under the covers and making sure Sam was securely tucked in. Kid had a habit of reaching out for Dean in the night and rolling right off the side of the mattress. Dean took his hoodie off and lay it over the top of Sam and then, finally content Sammy wouldn’t catch a cold in the night, got under the covers himself. After tucking Sam in there wasn’t much cover left to have, but Dean made do: he always made do.

If he was anyone else, he’d feel bitter about it, but he didn’t allow himself to.

John watched the television well into the night, using it as background noise to keep the demons away in his mind, the clink of bourbon and cheap beer piercing the jovial sounds of talk show laughter as sheaths of paper turned and rustled.

Dean grew up on these sounds, his own personal lullaby since the incident, and with Sam’s warmth at his back he allowed himself to slip into unconsciousness, the weight of his responsibility to his newfound soulmate and the dog tiredness of his training finally doing him in.

He didn’t sleep for very long.

=

The next day John was gone, leaving him behind with Sammy, bursting with questions and with flint in his eyes, ready to spark.

Dean lasted three weeks, three weeks of being parent and brother combined, before Sam wrenched the truth out of him: had found Dad’s journal under the bed and read well enough to understand it.

Sam had cried, and Dean had wanted to too. He’d tried to make it okay, to assure Sam that Dad was awesome, that he was such a good hunter that they’d always be safe, that nothing would ever get to him. He didn’t say what he was truly thinking: that he would be the one protecting Sammy, that even if Dad failed, he’d make sure he never would.

With his mark starkly mocking him on his wrist, Dean had felt nauseous as Sam cried and turned his back on him, all but told him to leave him alone. Dean’s heart had throbbed in his chest as he thought of any way, any way at all, that he could make this better.

=

As Christmas morning came, stolen presents and amulets revealed, the flicker of a smile coming back to Sam’s young face, Dean had finally felt the nagging insistence of the mark subside, his thoughts focused only on cartoon strip newspaper and the heavy weight of Sam’s present against his chest.

They watched The Grinch and It’s a Wonderful Life on the grainy falling apart TV set the motel provided, also green, and Dean tried hard not to scrutinise the way Sam watched the angel Clarence with awe and reverence, the warmth of his hazel eyes absorbed into the promise of a higher power, of hope and reason, of a supernatural guide bound by love, acceptance and good.

Dean didn’t want Sam to believe, it was too risky. He didn’t know yet if angels existed and he couldn’t bait his younger brother with false hope, with dreams of angelic choirs and halos and fancy golden harps, only to have Sam be cut down by what he had thought of as a graceful and omnipotent being. If an angel was what killed Sam, if the mark was even about Sam, Dean had to make it stone number one to keep Sam away from all that hopeful praying and yearning; had to put his foot down and hope Sam, stubborn petulant Sammy, for once in his young life, just followed Dean’s lead.

Dean didn’t hold out too much hope, though. Sam listened to him less and less these days, too much his father’s son to take ‘no’ for an answer and too much Dean’s baby brother to roll belly up and accept it.

“Do you think angels exist?” Sam suddenly asked, breaking into Dean’s thoughts, his fingertips touching the fuzzy static of the screen. His mouth was open in a small ‘O’, thoughts dashing fast as time behind his hazel eyes. Dean swallowed thickly, tightened the strap of his watch beneath his Henley and watched as Sam turned to him, idealistic and cheery with the small miracle that was their shared Christmas, girly gifts and all.

“No” he said. One word. Cutting Sam off at the knees.

Sam stilled, waited for Dean to continue and then frowned, mouth opening to argue his point, but Dean wouldn’t let him.

“Angels don’t exist, Sammy” Dean cut across “just like Santa or Unicorns. They’re not real”

“You don’t know that” Sam hit back, turned now to look squarely at Dean, his gangly legs crossed.

“Have you ever seen one?” countered Dean.

“No” scowled Sam “but I haven’t seen most of the stuff Dad hunts, you told me so, and neither have you and you know they’re real. How’s that any different?”

“Because somebody has seen them! Other hunters, regular people” Dean explained, trying not to let anger bite into his voice, not on Christmas, not after last night.

“There’s research and books and TV shows and all sorta junk” Dean continued, pushing his point.

Sam bit his lip, eyes scrunched in distaste at his brother’s flippancy, debate soon turning to annoyance and then anger.

“I think you’re wrong” Sam said firmly

“ _I_ believe in angels” Dean didn’t know if Sam was just saying that because he knew it would rile him up, or whether he truly believed it, but the word angel passing Sam’s lips was enough to churn his stomach.

“Shut up” Dean snapped.

“Why?” pushed Sam, anger full apparent now, incredulous that a fight about angels was the hill Dean wanted to die on.

“They don’t exist, Sam, now knock it off!” Dean seethed, furious at his brother and at himself, ruining the Christmas he had tried to save.

“Why? why can’t I believe? what’s it to _you_? you don’t have to believe too!” Sam glared, squaring his shoulders and planting his heels, obstinate.

Dean wanted to punch something, but he settled for casting his fury at Clarence the angel instead, waves of livid intensity burying their way into that stupid trench coat: wishing they’d never watched this movie in the first place.

“You can believe whatever you want Sam, doesn’t make it true” Dean said, mostly to Clarence, but loud enough that Sam heard it loud and clear.

Sam kicked his shin boyishly at that, temper so strong even at eight years old, and Dean let him have it, didn’t rise to the bait of rough housing over a movie.

“I will!” Sam said, coldly and turned his back on Dean, sulked the rest of the movie through, shooting Dean poisonous looks over his skinny shoulder whenever he felt his anger was being ignored.

Dean let Sam stew, instead moved aside his father’s watch and traced his thumb over the silvery skin of his new scar.

 _Angel_.

Maybe it didn’t mean what he thought it meant, maybe it was just as simple as a girl and a tragedy, same as dad, but Dean wasn’t going to leave anything to chance, not where Sam could be involved.

=

As the movie rolled its credits and a fresh sheet of snow beat its way against the motel windows, Dean let his anger and shame manifest itself and then move away, settle itself in a crevice of his brain where he kept everything he wasn’t ready to deal with yet. Sam was turned away from him still, but his breathing indicated he was still awake, skinny back moving steadily up and down and his feet flexing inside Dean’s socks: the thick winter ones with the holes he hadn’t given back after Dean had put them on him weeks prior.

“Sam” Dean tried, moving to shake his brother’s shoulder as if he really had been asleep, keeping up the pre-text that Sam had created.

Sam pretended he didn’t hear him, but Dean knew him better.

“You want candy? I got peanut M & M’s”

It was an olive branch, and Sam knew it as well as Dean did. It was a truce, a bridge, a lowering of the musket. Sam hesitated, his long lashes flickering as he debated letting up his rouse of sleep and ignorance, and then he turned, shoulder drawing back, petulant face gazing up at Dean and Dean knew he’d won.

“Do you have Twizzlers?” Sam asked quietly, eyes skittering away from Dean’s gaze and then firmly drawing back to take his brother in.

Dean’s lips twitched in a smile and he shoved jovially at Sam’s chest, huffed a laugh when Sam complained and shoved him back.

“Why? M & M’s not good enough for you, Sammy?”

“I was just asking! you don’t need to be a jerk” Sam scowled, but he was half smiling now and Dean didn’t take it personally.

“You’re the jerk”

“No!”

“Jerk!”

“Loser!”

“Asshead!”

Dean snorted at Sam’s furious glare as he went to retrieve the M & M’s, heart feeling lighter than it had in weeks as he circled round, reached under the bed, and threw a slim plastic package onto Sam’s lap. Sam stared down at the Twizzler packet, blinked in monumental surprise, and then stared up at Dean with shock and blooming joy, his dimples breaking out of his otherwise stony cheeks, teenage mood swings before he’d even hit puberty.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awesome, save it” Dean buffered, shy now he had Sam’s full attention again.

He had picked up the Twizzlers when he raided the house up the street for presents, had seen them on the side in the kitchen alongside more candy than anyone could ever hope to eat. Dean had felt so alone in that house, so out of touch with the American dream that most families lived and breathed for.

The only American dream he had ever known was a broken one: filled with monsters, pain, tears and death. It was the lifestyle of most peoples nightmares, whereas Dean’s nightmares were filled with homework he didn’t understand, the idea of a dinner table where nobody he knew was there, foster parents and Sam, Sam long gone to some other family, a family who could love and care for him in that regular apple pie white picket fence way he knew Sam deserved, the one that he could never give him.

So yeah, he’d stolen the candy. Thought about stealing a lot more than that too, but didn’t want to be caught. John had drilled it into him that if he absolutely had to, he could steal, but he didn’t think stealing Christmas presents, candy and some rich asshole’s Rolex fit the bill. What ten-year-old needed a Rolex anyway?

“Thanks” Sam said, awed, as he looked at the candy. He couldn’t even open it he was so shocked and so, with an eye roll and a snort, Dean did it for him, making sure to do it carefully, knew how Sam would bitch if the wrapper was ripped. Sam was so anal about that kind of thing; wouldn’t even deface library books he’d stolen from libraries two hundred miles in their rear-view mirror.

The candy worked like a dream, got Sam to unfold his lanky coltish limbs and join Dean with his back against the worn and lumpy sofa cushions as the TV choked and spluttered onto another channel, gracing them with Rank and Bass’ Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and bathing them in the cutesy yule tide colors of commercialism.

“This is great” Sam said as Rudolph was introduced on the screen, skinny legs and bandy enthusiasm reminding Dean of his baby brother.

“Thanks…really” Dean glanced sidelong at Sam, thought of the mark on his wrist.

“Don’t mention it” he said and then made himself smile when he saw Sam frown, that annoyance at Dean being John level flippant presenting itself again.

The rest of the night passed in companionship, the Winchester brothers shoulder to shoulder on the sunken motel couch, sharing M & M’s and Twizzlers, making fun of the stop motion of the 1960s and Dean complaining about the way modern cars were awful compared to the beauty of their Dad’s 1967 Chevy Impala: seemingly the only thing Dean knew to debate about the 60’s.

They fell asleep in front of the TV, didn’t make it to Rudolph helping Santa’s sleigh fly. Sam’s face was burrowed into Dean’s neck, warm puffs of heat against Dean’s jawline, Dean’s hands bringing Sam’s knees toward him in a hug, securing him to his side in a show of inanimate possessiveness.

They stayed like that until morning, when Dean’s bladder screamed at him and their stomachs collectively groaned in protest at having had no solid food except additives and sugar for the last twenty-four hours.

The mark on Dean’s wrist didn’t bother him after that: he grew to ignore it, to cover it with watches and sleeves, to explain it away as a tattoo his dad let him get because ‘he believed I was man enough’. Kids would believe anything, and turning the route into teenage hood, girls loved that Dean had ink on his skin, thought it made him biker rough, that it added to his mystery and allure.

Dean did his research, kept track of any mention of angels, of strange occurrences, but they could always be explained away: a vampire, a werewolf, a rugaru, some forest spirit messing with people who built on its sacred land. Nothing ever pointed toward angels, never even hinted at it, and so Dean let it go, let go of the notion that his mark had any supernatural prominence whatsoever.

And he held onto that thought, well into adulthood, even when Sam left him for Stanford, even when dad died and left him and Sam snapping at each other’s necks, broken and bloody and torn apart in ways he couldn’t dream to fix. He kept that security of thought even when he went and made a deal to bring Sam back, demons were real sure but not angels, never angels. If the crossroads demon saw his mark, she didn’t comment on it, didn’t give him a hint, and Dean hadn’t needed her to. If it been for Sam, it would’ve been an angel that had taken him out, not some rogue soldier with a jagged knife that had fileted his baby brother’s vertebra like he was a piece of meat.

Dean had almost given up on the idea of the mark, of worrying about it connecting to Sam. He’d also given up on the idea of a soulmate, of ever being with anyone long enough to fall in love and care about losing them the way he cared about Sam.

He’d brought his brother back from the dead and sold his soul without a second thought. He’d saved his brother, couldn’t live without him, couldn’t go a step further without smart, passionate, bratty Sam at his heels. Couldn’t drive a mile more without the huff of his researching brother in the passenger seat, the way Sam still put his damn trainers up on the leather upholstery, the way Sam sucked his fingers into his mouth and chewed on his cuticles, held a torch over maps and print outs to guide Dean to the next place he was useful, the next place he had a purpose: drive, sleep, eat, shoot.

No, Dean didn’t believe in angels. But when an angel faced him down in a dirty rundown warehouse, trench coat and blue tie and electric shards of power sparking behind him, it was kind of hard to deny it any longer. He was free of hell, had been saved by a self-professed angel of the lord, had been raised from perdition and granted a second chance at whatever the universe had laid out for him.

He had been wrong after all, angels did exist, and the proverbial mark on his wrist began to tick.


	2. To hell and back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angels are real, and Dean Winchester is lost. What does this new threat mean and is this Castiel the Angel that his soul mark talked about? Set in S4 this chapter focuses on Dean's worst nightmare coming true and takes our boys on a rollercoaster of emotion as Sam's desperate desire to believe in good couples with his brother's adamant hatred of Angels and his burning desire to keep his little brother safe, no matter the cost.

**September, 2008**

Dean hadn’t stopped shaking since the warehouse, since the second the corrugated steel on the roof had flapped like a startled bird and the lights above him had splashed their blue white electric down to beat against the trench coated shoulders of the thing Dean had learned to fear the most. 

An Angel. A real, douchiest than douchey, warrior of God, Angel. 

Castiel, it had called itself, admitted to having possessed some fool who had been devout enough to open himself up body and soul to being a crackpot ventriloquists dummy. Dean would’ve felt sorry for him, whoever the vessel was, but he didn’t feel much these days that wasn’t easily dulled by alcohol, smothered by nightmares or snuffed out by the purr of Baby’s engine, gas pedal floored beneath his blood-spattered boot. 

Keep driving, keep fighting, keep on moving. 

Dean hadn’t stopped for a second since Stanford. Not since he picked up his college bound, sure footed, civilian clothed little brother and strapped him in for a ride that hadn’t yet ended, that Dean feared would never end. And even if it did, what would that even mean for him? If Hell couldn’t keep him contained, then there was truly nowhere for him to go. He didn’t deserve to go anywhere else. 

Dean was an anomaly, a parasite, a hunter with a butcher’s smile and a mark that told him that even his soulmate would eventually leave him. 

Castiel had accused him of not having faith, of being a soulless man, a husk filled with negativity and grit. Dean didn’t have to dig down deep to know that it had been right. That knowledge lived on the surface of his consciousness daily, a fact ready for the picking, a layer of adhesive hatred and disgust that lingered on the fingertips of whoever touched him, that pricked the eyes of whomever dared to glance in his direction. 

The Angel’s comment had thrown him off, made him feel raw and vulnerable in a way he hadn’t felt since his father had been alive. The Angel had known him, had seen through him with that particular x-ray vision that only Sammy usually possessed. It had known, known that Dean Winchester was a man devoted not to the church, or even to the people he risked his life to save, but to his brother: his stubborn, intelligent, selfless baby brother. If Dean was a shadow of a man then it was to his own credit: he had inscribed Sam on his bones and took whatever came at him with the knowledge that as long as his brother was safe, it was fair game. 

Dean was his own worst enemy, his own martyr and the pauper at his own funeral. 

The Angel knew that Dean was a man succumbed to the hunt, to the tang of metallic blood on his tongue, to the thrill of an easy fuck and to the knowledge that his lot in life was to live out what would send most folks screaming, brain leaking and heart untethered, to an early grave. 

Dean had just been in an early grave, and he didn’t recommend it. 

He was back now, back with Sam and Bobby at Singer’s Salvage. Safe, but for how long? There were no guarantees in this job and now with the sudden revelation of Angel’s overseeing their every move their assured life expectancy, and especially his little brother’s, swung in the balance.

They had been at it for hours, had researched and called every hunter they’d ever known, looked for answers in every nook and cranny they could think of. Angels weren’t meant to be a real; they were a fairy tail, a tool in a moral argument, they weren’t meant to sit and read the Bible and take it _literally_. Dean cradled a beer to his temple and heard the erratic tremor of his own pulse, felt the ravaged burn of his soulmate mark, suddenly awake, as it tingled with refreshed blood circulation. He couldn’t stop his mind from spinning. 

Angels were real. Angels were real and Dean was so screwed he didn’t even know how to put two and two together, didn’t know how to listen to Sam, his bright eyed, gentle as sin, achingly passionate brother, talk about how this was a goddamn miracle, that finally, _finally_ , they had a good guy on their side. 

What did that make him, Dean wondered, if an Angel potentially fated to kill his soulmate was the good guy? If an Angel was the congregation’s bread and wine, the thing they adored and shunted up onto pillars and plinths made of marble and gold. What did it make him, a man ravaged by loss, by Hell, a man whose wrist was soured by the inscription of a curse, a man who was surer and surer each day that his soulmate, the infamous, fated, doomed soulmate of Dean Winchester, was none other than his precious, untainted, baby brother?

“Sam” Dean interrupted coolly, finally butted into his brother’s endless recitations of Biblical lore. 

His temple throbbed where he had nudged the beer up against it, dulled chill to flaming frenzied heat. 

“Drop it, man. This _Castiel_? He’s not a good guy, he’s got some poor bastard tangled up in there with his Angel mojo or whatever, probably killed him already and sporting his meat suit like it’s goddamn Vuitton. He’s bad news, Sam. He’s not gonna help us”

Sam, so different now than when Dean had left him, looked over at him, incredulous and still so goddamn hopeful it made Dean’s mark burn aggressively enough that he thought his sleeve had caught fire. Sam was adamant that Castiel was the answer to all of his prayers whilst unbeknownst to him the Angel was now the default of every one of Dean’s nightmares

“Oh, come _on_!” Sam exclaimed, eyebrows tilted and his mouth a diagonal slump.

“You met him, what? Once? You don’t know what he’s like! What’s so bad about Angels, anyway? This could be _good_ for us, Dean! He could help us track down Lilith, put a stop to everything! Don’t you want that?”

Dean dropped his beer from his cheek and stood up, weighted himself with the sigh of a man dispassionate and spurned. He marched past Sam and grabbed one of the ancient furry looking books Bobby had been scouring through, flipped through the pages rapidly and then shoved an illustration of an angel toward Sam’s face. The Angel was twisted and shaky, a blur of misleading angles and sharp edges: an unclear commodity and a clear warning in Dean’s books. 

“Does THIS look like someone you can trust, Sam?” Dean demanded, stoic and immovable. 

“You didn’t meet him, it, whatever the damn thing is, _you_ didn’t meet him, it, DAMMNIT!” Dean slammed the book down, raised his hands up, placated himself and then let out a slow and steadied breath. 

“You didn’t meet him, Sam, but _I_ did. Believe me man, you don’t know squat, just what you want to believe from your damn Sunday school, dewy eyed Bible bashing wackacadoos. This is _not_ a good idea, and I’m not doin’ it, so quit asking. I’m not letting you near him, and that’s final”

Sam scoffed and his eyebrows shot up toward his ever-changing hair line. His dimples flashed imperiously in his freshly shaved cheeks. 

“You’re not _letting_ me? What, did I miss the memo? Are you my caretaker now?” he demanded, incredulous at Dean’s sudden evasive and utilitarian commander shtick. 

Dean snorted.

“Damn right I am, and you’re gonna listen. I’m not goin’ back to Hell just ‘cus you were too goddamn stupid to listen to me. It’s what’s best, Sam, trust me” His eyes bored into Sam’s, unfiltered green against gauzy hazel brown.

Sam huffed out a disbelieving breath and his irregular quirked smile quivered on his lips, unsure if he should be pissed or amused at his brother’s sudden show of dominance.

“No! you know what-“ Sam began, would’ve got further if Bobby hadn’t then decided to make his stand. 

“Are you boys done airin’ yer dirty laundry? Givin’ me a headache” he groused, gave Dean a wide eyed warning and Sam a stern faced how’d you do. 

“I’m done if he is” Sam said, puffed his chest out and squared his jaw, hazel eyes narrowed as he tried to bait Dean, his favourite past time as of late, baiting him to anything that could get his big brother to show emotion.

Dean, exhausted and ready to flay the skin off his wrist with his grave digger’s fingernails, ignored his brother. Waved a hand flippantly at Bobby to continue. 

“Alrigh’” Bobby looked between the two of them and braced his hands on either side of an even dustier tome than any of the books he’d dredged up before. 

“So, turns out there’s some truth to what this Castiel fella is sayin’. Very early texts mention all kind of stuff about Angels, jus’ didn’t have to take it seriously before”

“Why the hell not?” Dean interrupted, suddenly snapped, all their talk of Angels having put him on edge. 

Sam eyed him quietly but didn’t say anything, crossed his arms defensively over his broad flannel covered chest.

“If you knew about this crap, why didn’t you say so before? I mean come on, Bobby, these guys have just been waitin’ around for, what, Millennia? To pull me outta hell and start some sorta war? That’s crap, there’s gotta be another reason!”

Dean urged, eyebrows lofty and pitch heightened.

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!” Bobby scowled, flipped the pages of the crusty book and then shoved it round so Sam and Dean both could see.

The images on the reed like paper were inlaid with gold and the text had been meticulously written in inked cursive. It was a religious text, a tribute, an ode to hope and glory of the messengers of the Lord. 

It made Dean feel nauseous. 

“It’s just Bible verse” Sam commented, brow furrowed as he reached out with timid fingers to trace the age softened lines of the Angel in the texts accompanying illustration.

Dean tensed his knuckles, bit back the overriding desire to rip Sam away from the Angel in the book, to bind Sam up and keep him infantile and naïve, a babe needing for nothing because his big brother wouldn’t let anything close enough to harm him. 

“It’s uh- Luke 20:35 and 36” Sam muttered as his eyes skid across the rows of inverted looping script. Dean watched as his slim pink mouth moulded its way round the words of the Lord and hated every second. 

“Luke? You mean it’s _literally_ from the Bible?” he asked, pressed himself up against Sam’s flank and enjoyed the dispel of hot air from his brother’s nose that meant he was pissed Dean was up in his personal space. 

Good. He didn’t care. He needed to be near Sam if he wasn’t gonna blow a gasket over this whole Angel thing. It was all getting way too close to home, and Dean’s home was invariably Sam. 

“Yeah, Dean. We already said that” Sam scowled, shoved the book toward his big brother so he could read the scripture for himself. 

Dean read. 

_‘But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection’_

“You plannin’ on getting’ married any time soon?” Bobby asked, voice gruff with mirth.

Sam snorted “yeah, right”.

He tried to flip the page and would’ve succeeded if Dean hadn’t had suddenly slammed his palm down on the book, did it hard enough that Bobby’s three fingered whiskey shuddered on the cluttered worktop.

“What the hell, man!” 

“Watch it, boy!”

“This…this is about, ‘bout me” Dean said in revelation, stabbed the text with a slightly unhinged finger. 

“So…what? Yer immortal now, that what you tellin’ me?” Bobby asked, disbelieving. 

“No!” Dean scowled, bit his lip as he tried to think how to phrase the million and one thoughts that pummelled their way round his overburdened skull.

“Just- the resurrection, that makes sense, right? And then not bein’ committed to anyone, sounds like they’d be making sure of it, making sure I don’t have anything that could hold me back, keeping me from being what they’d need. A soldier. They’re gonna keep me alive no matter what because they need me for something”

“Is that what Castiel told you?” Sam implored, eyes rounded now in his face, anger and resentment at Dean’s earlier comments seemingly dissipated.

“No” Dean admitted slowly, hated seeing the way Sam’s trust and worship dried up and banished itself at his words. 

“No, but- it makes sense, right? They brought me back, gotta be a good reason. Castiel, whatever his name is, said God had ‘work’ for me. M’sure they don’t resurrect every Tom, Dick and Harry whose dumb enough to make a deal”

Sam winced at that and Dean hated himself for it: added it to the list of torturous melancholy he had stored away for the night-time hours to punish himself.

“But the marriage part, you being alone” Sam looked to Dean, open but not understanding. Dean hadn’t seen Sam so entranced in a long time: the thrill of the puzzle.

“Why’d you think that’s got anything to do with you?”

Dean’s mouth dried up at that, his palms having now deposited their fair share of nervous lather. He couldn’t tell him, not about the mark. He’d come this far and he didn’t plan to stop now. Sam had no need to know, had made it seventeen years not knowing that his big brother was his ill fated and morally questionable soulmate.

Dean said nothing and Sam, petulant pushy Sam, waited him out.

“I mean-“ Dean chuckled, huffed as nervous motion shifted his ribs.

A smile opened and closed on his lips as he tried to blaspheme his way out of a tight spot.

“’less you’re plannin’ on poppin’ the question anytime soon Sammy, think I’m pretty much off the market”

Sam waited an excruciatingly long millisecond to respond, just watched Dean with searingly blank features until Dean felt his right eye begin to twitch. After an age though he finally huffed and dark annoyance blanketed his features, swallowed whatever light that had previously been there.

He’d obviously thought he’d finally cracked Dean enough that he’d get a solid, straight answer.

Boy, if only he knew how wrong he was.

“Not likely” Sam grunted, hazel eyes trained on the illustrated Angel once more, his dark lashes splayed downward in a way that had Dean wanting to blow them reverently off his fingertips and make a wish.

“Yer upcomin’ nuptials aside, the hell we gonna do about this?” Bobby cleared his throat, redirected the conversation.

The elder hunter rubbed his hand over his beard and then picked up his partially spilled Hunter’s Helper, took a sip of the potent amber and swallowed it down like spring water. The mark of a true professional; one who’d seen it all.

Dean wet his lips thoughtfully, chewed the inside of his cheek. He had no answers, not really, hell, he didn’t even have a plan. He’d been in the pit for what had felt like decades, day after day of agonising torment, his body splintered, frayed, burned and threaded with poisoned barbs. He’d lived through unimaginable trauma, had had his own brain lobotomised whilst he screamed out brutalised shrieks of pain. He’d had his skin scrubbed off his bones with acid, yelled for Sammy, begged and pleaded whilst his skin pulped and melted off him, sticky and gelatinous, blood dark as pitch as it stained the stone floor beneath him and he’d watched as it absorbed every drop, never sated, never satisfied.

Now he was meant to be some sort of special piece, a reluctant bloodied pawn on an Angelic chessboard with infinite stakes. Dean had worked so goddamn hard to keep Angels away, to keep them as a sour afterthought, a ridiculous commodity, an irregularity, an outlier. He’d had had a lot of time to think in the pit: a lot of agonisingly slow hours, seconds stretched to minutes stretched to decades of torture, to think about his mark and about the existence of feathery good doing bible bashers.

Alistair, his head torturer, had mocked him about it, had teased Dean with hints and snippets, had waved nuggets of information under his nose, had whispered breathy rotten stank into his sometimes deaf, sometimes detached, sometimes just goddamn bloody, ears. Had told him of a plan, of an overarching destiny that had to be fulfilled. Dean didn’t believe a damn word of it, didn’t believe a demon whose job description was to keep him strung up and leaking organ juice for eternity, but he used it, cultivated it, pieced those meddlesome whispers together until they made a lick of sense.

No, Dean didn’t believe his captor, not one bit, but he did owe him one. You see, only one thing that Alistair had said, and one thing he’d done, had stuck with Dean. And for that he was grateful, because that commander of demons, that cocky slithery maggoty son of a bitch? He’d confirmed what he had already worked out to be true. That the mark? It was about Sam.

Dean already suspected it, hell, he had been living his whole goddamn life with that truth as stone number one since he was twelve years old. But in the merciless bowels of hell, through the pain and the mental incapacitation, through the brands and the beatings, Dean had made his peace with it. The mark was about Sam, had always been about Sam. The other half of his soul, the reason he’d sold his own to end up down in that rotten place to begin with.

It would never have been anyone else, he saw that now. Had been Sam since the second he was born and came home bundled up in blankets, little knitted hat over his bulbous head, tiny licks of feather soft curls that had poked out under the wool. Dean had held Sam on the day he had come home from hospital and had then slept in his room with him every night that week, had held his baby brother’s delicate, chubby little fingers and told him it was okay, he could sleep, he was there. Nothing bad was gonna happen to him.

It had been Sam all the while they’d grown up, when they’d beaten each other asses and driven each other crazy living in each other’s back pockets. Had been Sam when they’d shared bowls of store brand cereal eaten dry because they’d forgotten to buy milk before Dad went out of town and Dean had blown their rations on getting Sammy the books he needed to study for school. He’d wanted Sam to use that big brain of his to get those A+ transcripts and tick off the exams he needed. Hadn’t realised that he’d been sowing the seeds of his own destruction and that those tests would eventually lead to Sam leaving him, would lead to his brother having stormed out into the cold unforgiving night and catching a Greyhound coach off to sunny California. Sammy having left for good. Or so he’d thought.

It was Sam through the months that they had searched for Dad, through the fights and the tears, through the nightmares and the physic premonitions that had left Dean scrambling for purchase on reality. Not his Sam, not his baby brother. Dean hadn’t known what had caused it, had thought maybe it had been the Angel come to take away his only reason for living, had tried to convince himself it was for John that he had brought Sam back into the life and had torn him away from the promise of love and happiness, of education and a way out of the dark, had dragged him back to the grit and the grime and the disease that was hunting.

Dean couldn’t lie to himself though, couldn’t lie that it was about anything other than his selfish need to have Sam where he could see him, where he could touch him and feel the staccato of his brother’s hitched breaths against his neck, that made him seek Sam out. That he needed to see the evidence of Sam’s life as it stained bloody against his fingers. That he needed to be the one to look after Sam even if it meant he patched his brother up, held sterilised needles between his teeth, and snicked open the top of a beer can to drown his addled mind.

Then there had come the psychic camp, the evidence that Sam’s visions hadn’t been by an Angel after all, but by none other than Azazel, the yellow eyed demon with a wicked smirk and a bone to grind with the Winchester boys, or more specifically, with his favourite, with Sam. Dean had been relieved, so goddamn relieved that an Angel wasn’t after his brother, that he hadn’t even stopped to consider that that night would be Sam’s last: that his fantastically smart, brilliant, dazzling little brother would then die in his arms at the non-age of twenty four, his bones sagged and neck slumped, bleary eyed and not understanding, not able to focus on his brother, on anything but the fissure in his back that seeped his life out into the bark and the mud beneath their knees.

Dean knew his soulmate was Sam. He knew it and he was pretty sure John had known it too, hadn’t given him orders that dictated he strapped a watch over the mark and buried the secret down deep for no reason. And he didn’t feel dirty about it anymore, didn’t feel disgust and immorality warring inside him with each step he took, didn’t burn reprimands into his mind when his fingers so much as brushed against Sam’s when their strides matched, didn’t chew canker sores into his cheeks, shred them to ribbons just to punish himself for bathing in the glory of his brother’s dimpled smile.

His hatred for himself still existed, but Dean didn’t let himself wallow anymore, not since the pit. Sam needed saving and no matter what Dean thought about himself, no matter if he thought about the peak of Sam’s tan hip as it pushed past the belt loops of his jeans or the way his brother’s mouth was shaped like a mountain peak, pink and soft, and that it begged for someone, for Dean, his soulmate, to climb it and stake his claim, flag pole and all. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. There was no happy ending for Dean there, and so he’d let it go, pushed Sam at girls they met on hunts, claimed he was helping him bounce back after the horror of Jessica’s murder.

It was all a lie. But lucky for Sam, Dean was a professional.

“Why don’t we just ask?” Sam piped up, broke into Dean’s fastidious recollections and snapped him back to reality. 

“Ask who?” Dean grunted, raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms over himself as his right hand gripped his left wrist: naked without a watch since the pit.

“Castiel” Sam said simply, like it had been obvious, like Dean was the idiot.

“Come on, Sam- “

“No, I’m serious! if we need to know so bad, we should just ask him! We could summon him again, you and Bobby did it already so we know it works, and we could just-“ Sam waved his hands around, struggled to find the right word.

“What?” Dean scoffed, incredulous “just what, Sam? Sing kumbaya and have story time? Do a fact check? A godly Q & A?”

“Why is that so crazy?” Sam demanded “He’s the one who knows, Dean! It’s common sense!”

The younger Winchester’s eyes were wide and emotive, determined and anything but subservient. His face flickered in a frown as he narrowed in on Dean’s peculiar hold on himself and he hesitated, but then seemingly decided to let it go.

“Since when did common sense ever get us anywhere?” Dean dropped his arms, one sleeve buttoned round the cuff and the other loose. The right flapped open as he gesticulated wildly.

“Since when do we just go and ask _monsters_ for help?”

“He’s not a monster, Dean! He’s an _Angel_!” Sam huffed, the circular nature of their fight having worn his patience thin.

“We don’t know that for sure!” Dean suddenly boomed, eyes flared wide as his mark burned holy hell against the tendons of his wrist.

Sam watched him, fumed as his chest heaved with restrained emotion and little brother prissiness’.

Bobby slammed the gilded book they’d been looking at shut.

“You two need a time out” he snapped, final.

“Yeah, we do” Dean agreed, anger that suddenly made his head spin.

“Sam, go be a wise ass somewhere else”

“You know what-“ Dean raised his forearms up just in time, blocked Sam as his little brother threw his weight against him, angled his arm for a right hook but didn’t make it.

Dean was faster, more equipped for the kill and had Sam bent double with his head between his knees and his breath huffed onto his boots in less than a second.

“DEAN! Let me GO!” Sam snarled, tried to kick Dean’s legs out from under him.

“Quit being a lil’ bitch and maybe I’ll consider it!” Dean tightened his grip, flung Sam round and suddenly toppled as Sam grabbed his sleeve.

Sam hauled Dean down with him and body slammed him to the floor, bony hips against Dean’s, his grubby Angel loving hands an axe that shattered Dean’s confidence as they pinned him, arms above his head and knees knocked together, like goddamn Anne Darrow.

“SAM!” Dean thrashed, tried to shove his baby brother off with a body roll that sent all the wrong kind of feelings skittering through his body.

Sam was too close, had his hands on Dean’s wrists, on the mark, over the mark. Dean only had a piece of flimsy fabric between Sam and the truth and his heart palpitated in his chest, his ribs seized up in panic.

“Quit being a lil’ bitch and maybe I’ll consider it!” Sam snarled back, voice mockingly sweet, regurgitated Dean’s own words.

Dean couldn’t take it anymore, and as it turned out, neither could Bobby.

“What the HELL has got into you two?” Bobby yelled, pulled Sam off his brother by the nape of his neck and shoved him away so hard he honest to God stumbled.

Dean leveraged himself up using one of Bobby’s ancient crumbling bookcases, groaned in pain and pulled his sleeve down tight against his wrist, cradled his arm in toward his chest like a maiden deflowered.

“Nothin’, we’re fine” he grumbled, breathed hard and turned his face away when Sam, who was leant against the doorway to Bobby’s kitchen, scoffed.

“Fine my ass. Now, quit fightin’, yer not goddamn sister wives”

Bobby snapped.

The elder hunter held their respective gazes with the fury of a disturbed home owner and the resignation of a besmirched father before he gave up and stormed past them, left out to the salvage yard and slammed the door shut behind himself so hard the glass window pane rattled. Dean couldn’t think of a single thing to say to Sam after that and so they both went their separate ways, Sam to research more about Angels and Dean to take a shower. He’d stayed there under the spray until the boiled water of the constipated water heater had run out, had tried and failed to scrub the stinging throbbing pain of his mark away, to shake the tang of hell from his bones and will away the handprint forever immortalised on his bicep: the brand of the monster that would take his Sammy away.

As usual, it never worked.

=

A few weeks later, the ghosts turned up. Henriksen, Meg, Ronald: brands on their sickly pale skin, smudges of dark shadows, painful as a bruise beneath their crazed and frenzied eyes.

Meg had had it out with him, had driven her rampage home by talking about how Dean had killed her, had let another innocent die, how he hadn’t cared about anything beyond ganking the demon that hurt his family and possessed his precious baby brother.

She’d blamed him for her death, said she’d been begging, screaming, had pleaded with him to spare her. That him killing her, no regard for a human soul pushed aside by demonic smoke, had led to the suicide of her little sister, a sister that worshipped her and was forever lost once she witnessed her big sister’s mangled body black and blue in the morgue, tossed away just as carelessly as a crumpled paper cup, one time use and never look back.

Then had come holier than thou Castiel with his 66 seals and his religious speal. He’d talked about the goddamn apocalypse, about Lucifer released from his cage, about Lilith and her burgeoning scheme to bring about the end of times.

Dean had been running out of emotional mileage, running out of liquor and sleeping pills to stave off the nightmares, running out of craps left to give about anything other than Sam. But he had listened, like a good solider. He’d listened and absorbed and taken in the knowledge that one of the nastiest Angels of all time, a fallen one at that, could be released to foul the earth, to hunt down his brother and string him up like a crumpled, hollowed out marionette.

Dean had no clue what Lucifer would even want with Sam, had no goddamn proof that he did except the throbbing of his mark and the burn of his nauseous breaths in his emaciated lungs, but he wasn’t about to find out, wasn’t about to let there be any truth to his fears.

Castiel said apocalypse and Dean Winchester didn’t care. He would burn the whole damn earth if he had to, just as long as Sammy was safe.

=

Dean, unsurprisingly, couldn’t sleep that night. He hadn’t told Sam yet about the end of the world and if he was being honest, he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep Sam pliant and hopeful so he could hold on to his last vestiges of hope that his brother would outlive this life of theirs, would get out and build a home, a family, another existence beyond following in Dean’s macabre shadow.

Sam though, always hyper aware of Dean in ways even he didn’t understand, wasn’t sleeping either: was woken up Dean going downstairs, by the clink of a beer as it left Bobby’s ever groaning, ever humming refrigerator. Sam appeared not five minutes after Dean did, bare footed and dressed in Dean’s old Metallica tee-shirt: the one he’d stolen away to Stanford. The one they never talked about having gone missing.

“Hey” his little brother volunteered, wary and subdued.

He was uneasy after their tussle with the ghosts and was wearing that pinched dimpled smile that told Dean that Sam couldn’t sleep a wink easier than he could.

“Hey” Dean returned, chucked Sam a line and pressed a cold beer into his slim typists’ fingers.

“Thanks” Sam bobbed his head, looked down at the beer.

Dean nodded and watched Sam instead, let his eyes have their freedom as they roamed his brother’s face, let himself take in the sharp angle of his jaw and the mole that kissed the intersection between his hazel eye and his slim pointed nose. He twisted the cap off his beer and drank.

It was eerily quiet in Bobby’s kitchen, just the whisper of the wind against the metal of the scrapyard filtering through the windows and the buzz of the electric appliances to keep them company: the occasional bleep of the landline to tell the occupant that their phone was still connected.

Dean eased himself into one of the wooden dining chairs around Bobby’s kitchen table and rubbed his eyes tiredly, listened for the sound of a second chair scraping across the floorboards, the huff of Sam as he tried to fit his long giraffe legs under the low table.

They sat like that for a few minutes, just breathed each other in and let everything that had happened since Dean had come back from Hell expunge itself from their minds and float unabated in the chilled early morning air. Sam didn’t drink his beer so much as play with it, used his thumbnail to shred the damp paper label off the bottle until the glue unwillingly letting it go, some fragments of the label left behind where the glue just couldn’t do it.

Dean drank for the both of them, downed his first beer like it was his morning OJ and retrieved a second whilst he ignored the heavy, judgemental gaze of his brother. Sam watched him, his slim hazel eyes fixed as they scoured over him, lashes dark in the low light. It made Dean’s body light up with the attention: made him want to preen and cower in equal measure.

Dean was a selfish bastard: he loved Sam’s focus being on him, his devotion and his need. He was the worst kind of enabler and no matter how much he knew it was wrong to encourage this dependency that his brother had on him, he couldn’t seem to find the will to stop beyond half-hearted shoves at Sam to go be with a girl or vague mentions of another life. Couldn’t even do that right: was always so relieved when he came back to him before the night was out, when he hadn’t spent the night in another’s bed. Always hoped that Sam shrugged off that horrid hallucinogen of California life like it was a fever dream and joined him permanently on the road.

Sam wasn’t stupid, he had to have figured out something was wrong by now, the way he followed Dean round, spent eight hours a day in a car with him and breathed the same air as him in countless run-down cheap motels night after night. Dean knew he was running out of time, out of velocity, couldn’t keep up the ruse forever. He didn’t even know which he wanted Sam to know less: about that he remembered hell or about the fact that he was his soulmate, had been marked for it since he was a kid.

Dean wanted to touch his brother in the hushed remoteness of that kitchen. He wanted to peel back his sleeve as he shoved the mark in Sam’s face and told him in no uncertain terms that Sam had to trust him, had to believe that Angels were bad.

They’re gonna kill you Sammy, they’re gonna take you away from me and I can’t live with you gone, can’t face a world without you in it. It’s you and me or not at all, and I’ve had the gun loaded and ready in my duffel since I was fifteen.

“Dean?” Sam suddenly spoke, his voice nothing more than a whisper, a lover’s caress of air against Dean’s shoulder where they sat closer than was strictly necessary.

They were always way too close, always pushed the line.

Dean looked at the faded black grey of his Metallica tee-shirt on Sam’s body, at the way it ran too short on his brother’s gigantic frame and skated just shy of the line of his angled skinny hips, the way his sweats strained up to meet it but how Sam didn’t seem to care: made him look like he posed for a frat boy magazine with the way his dark downy hair was sleep curled and ruffled: the way his pink mouth parted as he looked expectant and open at his brother.

“Yeah?” Dean finally responded, swallowed loud enough that it clicked, tucked his tongue back behind his teeth, a barrier so that it didn’t wet his lower lip.

Sam picked at his beer label again, his eyebrows drawn down into a W between his eyes. Dean watched as Sam chewed over his words, listened to the way his breath drew in to finally speak and then huffed out of him as he threw away that speech and opted for another.

“You okay, man?” Sam finally said, settled on simple and direct.

Dean hummed, raised his beer to his lips and took a swig.

“Yeah, m’fine Sammy. Why?”

“Just- the whole Angel thing, about Castiel” Sam offered, gently nudged it onto the floor with the insecurity of a first-time usher.

Dean wet his lips, glanced at Sam and hoped Castiel wasn’t like Betelgeuse and that if you mentioned his name three times it wouldn’t summon him: didn’t want to see that smarmy faced dick when he was having morally questionable thoughts about his baby brother wearing his old tee-shirt: possessive, potentially dirty thoughts that would have any Angel throw him back into the pit, adios and goodbye, toss away the key.

“I know you don’t like him…but he brought you back”

“He saved you, he brought you back to- “

To me. Dean heard it in the floored intake of breath his brother took, in the tremor of silence that followed.

“I know” Dean said, met Sam’s hurt puppy dog eyes full on and let the power of Sam’s pride and belief wash over him, let it pierce his skin as it attempted to tease him open.

He knew. He knew what Castiel had done: how even though he hated the Angel, he had to owe it something, had to owe him whatever debt he had to pay for being delivered back to his baby brother. Sam knew it, he knew it, but it didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

“Why do you hate angels so much?” Sam asked, turned on his chair and pushed his long slim legs under the spindly wooden legs of Dean’s, pinched nose and downturned mouth that told Dean that his brother had got cramp from trying to match his seated position.

“We didn’t even know that they were real until now. I just- never got it, why you hated them so bad. What was so wrong in believing in something like that? To just- to have hope, to have something good in our lives”

Dean listened to Sam speak, let his brother’s concern air into the trickle of morning light that had begun to spatter into Bobby’s kitchen. Watched as a burgeoning ray caught Sam’s eyes and flared them gold, picked out the fern green and the acorn brown and the ever-fickle flash of blue in Sam’s irises. Dean always liked that Sam had green in that mix: tempered his possessive nature when he saw a colour of his own reflected in Sam’s gaze: a piece of him that had latched itself onto his brother during his creation.

“You never talk about it” Sam admitted, looked to where Dean was nearly at the end of his second beer before the cock had even crowed morning.

“You used to…used to joke about it, then after that Christmas, you never talked about it again, got mad at me whenever I mentioned anything to do with them”

Dean remembered, of course he remembered. That was when he got the mark, that was the Christmas he tried hard to forget, the Christmas he’d let Sam down time and time again and tried desperately to make it better. The Christmas John had told him to let it go, to shove it down, to look out for Sammy and make sure that he wasn’t the thing Sam had to look out for.

The Christmas that he become a monster: the monster that shared his baby brother’s blankets when the sheet alone would’ve made Sam freeze, the monster that made him SpaghettiOs on a temperamental stove and heat up wet rags to apply to Sam’s ever mutating limbs, the monster who stroked back Sam’s hair and hushed him, told him it was gonna be okay when his baby brother had bitten his sobs into their motel pillow, bones growing too fast for his skinny body, the monster who looked after Sam as he clung to Dean, needy as a child when he was already becoming a man.

“Just got a bad feelin’” Dean finally responded, shrugged his shoulders lazily, the getaway car of excuses, looked away from Sam and down to the table top, swallowed down his screams and daren’t close his eyes: knew he’d see Sam there also.

“Didn’t make sense to me, if they did exist, that they could be good, y’know? I mean look at our lives, Sam. When has anything good ever happened to us?”

“It happened now” Sam said back, quick as a whip, pushed his chair closer to Dean’s so he could force him to lean back in his seat and look at him.

“An Angel brought you back, _that’s_ something good, Dean”

Dean wanted to kiss Sam then, had never truly allowed the urge to rise up before, not fully, had never entertained it, had felt it a million times since Sammy was a gangly teenager and to feel it again now swallowed him whole, took him kicking and screaming into the abyss.

“That ain’t proof, Sammy” Dean stuttered, flustered and disgusted, tried to move his chair away but got it caught on Sam’s long legs locking him in.

“They need me for somethin’, like I said”

“Yeah” Sam snorted, a rough derisive sound.

“You mean like Luke? The supposed prophecy; you never being happy, never getting attached?” Sam sounded bitter enough that Dean looked at him, surprised himself by seeing the fury and the hurt in his brother’s expression.

“That’s a load of crap Dean and we both know it” Sam fumed, had thrown his anger out like a lasso and hooked him, clueless and irresponsive, round the neck. Tightened it like a noose.

“Do we?” Dean muttered, left it a beat before responding, his eyes unfailingly wide, his voice a gruff whisper.

Sam paused when he saw his brother’s sudden vulnerability and for once, shut himself down.

“Yeah, Dean. We do” softer, open, Dean’s baby brother as he reached out to him as he always did.

We do; because you’ve got me. You’ll never be alone because you have me, I’ll always be by your side, it’s you and me, forever.

Oh, Sammy. No, not forever. If only you knew.

“I gotta tell you somethin’” Dean said suddenly, couldn’t take it any longer, couldn’t take the melodrama and the way Sam edged closer and closer to him, the way Sam’s hand rested so close to his on the stained and chipped table top.

So, he told him. He told Sam about the apocalypse, about Lucifer and Lilith and the 66 seals, told him everything he needed to know and downed another beer for his troubles, couldn’t get through the story sober as Sam looked at him so sincerely, looked at him as though he was deciphering the worlds hardest puzzle and he was the heavyweight champ, had never lost before and didn’t intend to start now.

And when it was all done, Sam didn’t waste a beat, didn’t seem discouraged, didn’t seem shaken or in the least bit scared. Dean had just told his baby brother that Lucifer could be raised from Hell and Sam, god fearing, gentle, compassionate Sam, just looked at him like he still hung the moon and the stars, like Dean had told him they had to face a rainbow unicorn rather than the devil.

Sam believed in him, Dean could feel it, knew any fool could feel it even if they were a million lightyears away. Sam with his neon sign of love and devotion blinding anybody who dared look in his direction, Sam with his cheerleader’s pom poms and his ‘I heart Dean’ tramp stamp, etched and carved onto the marrow of his soul.

“We won’t let that happen” Sam reassured him, hazel eyes gentle as his long-fingered hand reached out like he was going to touch Dean, to dare touch the undevout, before he retracted it and let it fall to his lap.

Dean hummed, matched the refrigerator in pitch and messed up when his tongue snaked out to wet his lips, nervous, ashamed, despairing. Sam watched the movement of his brother’s tongue, mirrored it with his own. Dean’s own personal fun house mirror.

He twitched a smile, let the worn muscle of his inner lip pull up and the heavyset of his burdened eyebrows lift, just for a moment, only for Sam. To comfort him, to give him more misplaced hope.

“Whatever you say, Sammy”

He lifted his fourth beer of the morning, waited for Sam to raise his first, and clinked the brown of their sweating glasses together: enjoyed the revibrating ring of their solidarity as it pierced the kitchen quiet, resolved for the millionth time in his life never to let Sam see what lay beneath his carefully constructed façade and watched as his baby brother gazed to the heavens, eyes aloft as he searched for Angels: wondered what he could ever do to convince his brother not to leave him.

=

Castiel sent Dean back to see his parents after that, just dropped him right smack dab in the middle of 1973, Back to the Future style. Had him face Azazel, learn the truth about his mom and watch as she made the horrific deal to save their dad, the deal that would one day lead to Dean’s beautiful baby brother becoming demon chow and bleeding out on some grotty stained mattress that didn’t know the pure and brilliant nature of the body it supported, wasn’t worthy of holding Sam Winchester, Dean’s entire world.

Castiel didn’t stop there though, no, he topped off the nightmare sundae when he had thrown Dean a bone, an address to be specific, had told him where he could find Sam, where he could find his brother who wasn’t curled up asleep in the bed next to him but was out there in the dark, using his demonic brain powers and smoking demons out of their meatsuits.

To say Dean was pissed would be an understatement. He’d railed into Sam when he’d finally got him alone, away from that demon bitch Ruby, away from all their seedy little secrets, away from anything that could take Sam away from him. Sam was so convinced, so blindsided, so radicalised by Ruby, that he couldn’t see the wood through the trees.

Sam couldn’t see that he was risking everything, his life, his mind, his soul, the soul that Dean had gone to hell for, just for the sake of a few vics, a few nameless bodies who weren’t worth him polluting his body for. Maybe Dean should’ve felt bad, maybe he should’ve cared, should’ve rationalised it, Sam was saving people, but no, he couldn’t. If the price was Sam then the price was too damn high: nothing was worth compromising him for, no number of lives or just desserts worth losing his brother to the evil of the monsters that they had been raised to hunt.

Castiel had threatened Sam: had told Dean to stop him before the Angels did. They had an excuse now, had a reason to hurt his brother, to fulfil the prophecy of the soulmate mark and take Sam away from him. They had a solid unshakable fact in their midst: Sam buddied up with a demon as he used his unnatural powers to settle hunts, to train, as he used the awful mockery of a gift that Azazel had lovingly dripped into his mouth as an infant. They had leverage, a motive, a tactile reason to hurt the only true reason Dean had for living, to wipe off the face of the earth his reason for fighting the fight that had been theirs through generational guilt and misfortune.

Dean shouldn’t be alive, should’ve been ash beneath Sam’s heels long ago, but he had always kept going, kept driving, kept pushing on for his brother. Every time he’d thought about giving up he’d seen Sam behind his eyelids and no matter how his insides screamed out for it to just be over already, to let the monster have its sleep, he knew he never would, not as long as Sam was out there. But if Sam wasn’t there? he wouldn’t be either. He’d already tried that and he couldn’t last the night without him, needed him safe as he breathed steadily, warm as blood in his cobra tight arms.

Sam had begged Dean to level with him, had wiped blood from shaken lips that his brother had put there, had trained his sloped desperate eyes on his brother and pleaded for relief, for a chance to explain himself, for Dean to see his side: but Dean just couldn’t. His mark burned more than it lay dormant those days, an ever-present threat since the Angels had revealed themselves, and more than ever he felt the countdown clock of Sam’s morality tick ticking away.

He couldn’t be sure when Sam’s last day would be, wished with everything he could pinpoint it to the last millisecond so he could be sure to stop it, but the more Sam dabbled in darkness, the more he threatened his soul and triggered the evil that brewed in his veins, Dean knew it was only a year, a month, hell even minutes and seconds before the Angels would strike him out.

He didn’t have time to learn how to see the good in Sam’s wickedness, he just needed Sam to stop, to think of himself for once in his damn life and not the well being of every one else.

Dean knew Sam wouldn’t do it though, wouldn’t ever stop being selfless: it was who Sam was, why Dean loved and adored and despised him in equal measure. He could never understand it, but then again, he was selfish, the opposite of Sam, thought only for the care of the world second and put his brother first: always top spot, front and centre, anything else an optional regard.

Dean wanted to help people, wanted to contribute to the mantra he’d grown up hearing, the one that first passed John’s lips and then later his own: saving people, hunting things, the family business. But he was broken, mated mind, body and soul to his baby brother, and as much as he wanted to avert the apocalypse and stop those 66 seals from being broken, ensuring that he saved Sam from the Angel that would take him away was the only priority he had.

Screw Castiel, screw Uriel and screw Lucifer. Dean would go out swinging, would spend another forty years in the pit bloody and beaten, ripped and ravaged, would spend another millennia in the pit with Alistair’s Sam centred torments before he’d let his brother be taken.

Things between Sam and him were tense after that. Dean looked out for him but Sam didn’t want it, didn’t want to lean as heavily on someone who had judged him, beaten him and made him feel small when all he wanted to do was feel like he’d done some good in his brother’s absence.

Sam told him he hated the way Dean looked at him, that he had felt dirty and disgusting and even more of a freak than he ever had before. He had told Dean that he had tried to take the curse he had and do something good with it, had screamed it in Dean’s face with his hands flown out to the side as spittle clung to his lips and his eyes flared wild and crazed in his devastation.

Dean had wanted to say something, he really had, had wanted to grab Sam’s broken and tear specked cheeks within his calloused, murderers’ hands, would’ve stared him down and taken Sam’s pain and self-hatred unto himself, sucked it out of him and taken it into the crevices of his own dark and grieved existence.

Dean had wanted to scream _me too, me too, I’m a freak too!_

Wanted to yell: I’ve been trying to do something good with this curse of mine my whole damn life Sam, haven’t achieved anything except I’ve pushed you right into the hands of your murderers. Keep putting you in harms way and hate myself for it, can’t breathe if I think about what I’ve done, how you’ve always deserved so much better than to be fated to a torturer, a man who would rather kneel at your alter than do a single day’s penance for the world he’s meant to save.

No good can ever come from me loving you, Sammy, but I can’t seem to stop.

But Dean had kept it in, had comforted Sam in actions rather than words. Had let Sam choose the music in the Impala and even let him drive, pushed down the sick taunts and jibes of his mind and rubbed raw at his soulmate mark until it bled: wrapped it in bandages and told Sam he cut it shaving, made up bullshit lies state by state.

And he had been getting away with it too, until the ghost sickness.

They had taken a case in Rock Ridge, Colorado, had read reports of men dropping dead, heart attacks that had cut their lives short: not a lick of illness, suicidal ideation or suspect circumstances between them. They’d blown into town and hadn’t expected much, perhaps some witchcraft, a really freaky looking clown or a possession if they’d been particularly unlucky, but what they had got in the end had been so much worse.

Worse for Dean, anyway. Oh, it just had to have been him, honestly, it just _had_ to have been.

Dean couldn’t control it once it started, couldn’t control his erratic anxiety fuelled outbursts or the way he shook like a leaf when Sam so much as suggested they eat at a diner they’d passed earlier that day: dirty, at an unhygienic soup kitchen of disease and death. No, Dean wasn’t going to risk anything he didn’t need to, he didn’t need the headache, the stress.

His nails had ripped at the skin of his tender forearms, made his nails bloody and sore as he gauged deep trenches into his arms that he wanted to burrow deeper down to the bone: wanted to rip out his ulna and play tick tak toe with his radius. He wanted to rip his skin to shreds and ravage it with his teeth: didn’t ever want to stop until the itch of his fear sodden mind was finally quiet.

Sam noticed first, of course he did, had spoken to Dean as you would a child and mollycoddled him into submission. Dean would’ve wanted to deck him if he wasn’t so on edge but as it was, he had just let Sam have at it, allowed his brother be the elder sibling for once and steer him whatever which way he wanted him to go. Sam had been trying so hard and Dean had known it, could read it in the creased lines of his high forehead and the way he shifted himself ever closer to Dean whenever he thought he could get away with it. He wanted to be forgiven, to be doted on and seen for who Dean had always thought he was: Sammy the genius, Sammy the freak geek, Sammy his one and only.

Dean wasn’t there yet though, couldn’t wipe the awful image of Sam bloody nosed and smiling from demonic satisfaction, out of his mind. He needed time, to bury the horrid revelation of his brother’s extracurricular activities far below and find a way to exist where he didn’t want to choke the evil out of his brother every time he looked at him. But as the days progressed, and as the ghost virus pumped through his veins, he found that all of his insecurity, all his guilt and his self-loathing: it bubbled ferociously to the surface.

He was suddenly an open wound, his ribs sprung open and revealing the tender shyness of his heart, the way he had always feared beyond anything a life without his baby brother, a life dictated by motion and despair, and how those very things were the only things he knew how to live for.

=

It was the second day of the virus now and Dean was a captive inside his own mind. He’d screamed at felines and run from small dogs, had freaked at every minor and major decision they’d made all day. He’d sweated through his daytime fed suit and dumped Sam outside the mill that was the ghosts stomping ground: had lost it, had vented and raved about the apocalypse, about their lives and their inability to do anything that wasn’t a fool’s errand. They were idiots, the dumbest of asses. The Winchesters were a load of crackpot lunatics and he wanted out, out, _out!_

Sam had found him in their motel room later that day and Dean couldn’t honestly tell his brother how he got there: knew he’d ran until his knees knocked and his teeth gnawed a sore in the side of his cheek but couldn’t remember much else. Both of his forearms were ribbons by now and Dean refused to let Sam see: denied to let Sam touch him and patch him up lest he got too close to his eye sore of a mark.

At first, Sam complied, under duress at least, but as Dean’s forearms leaked plasma and iron onto the second of their shared motel pillows and built up a lengthy motel cleaning bill for Mr. Jon Bon Jovi of Calabasas, California, Sam seemed to reach his breaking point.

“Dude!” Sam exclaimed in horror three hours later, finally ripped away the pillow Dean hugged like a new-born to his chest and stared down in muted disgust at the bloody stains now seeped into the cushion.

“What?” Dean demanded, detached: raised his eyebrows as he scratched aggressively at his right forearm.

Sam’s face inverted on itself and his eyebrows furrowed downward. His mouth pulled down at the corners like he had fisherman’s hook that pulled him back to the fly.

“You gotta let me look at that, it’s gonna get infected”

Dean jolted in response and glared at Sam with the wide-eyed innocence of a young maiden who had to protect her virtue.

“Dude! Gross! don’t say crap like that!”

“What? Afraid you’re gonna get even MORE infected?” Sam bemoaned, irritated, moved away from Dean and went to rummage inside one of their khaki military grade duffel bags.

Dean watched Sam’s broad shouldered back with distrust as he rustled around, felt violated when he realised it was his duffel that Sam shoved his way through and then immediately leapt back to hit the bed’s headboard when his brother turned around with gauze and antiseptic clutched in his fist.

“Dude- NO!”

“ _Dean_ ” Sam sighed, put upon and exasperated as his soft eyes searched Dean’s panicked expression, forced tender resolution into his gaze.

“I’m not kidding, Sam! you come at me with those and I’ll kick you so hard in the nuts you won’t be able to get _any_ girl pregnant!”

Dean, wild eyed as his brother approached despite his warning, whacked Sam’s hands away and hit the gauze right out of his hand. He felt a sick thrill as he watched Sam dive for it and got to see the crest of his brother’s pert butt disappearing beneath ratty motel bed frills.

Sam stood back up with the gauze and rolled his shoulders back, turned to Dean and looked at him prissily, coldly, jaw ticking with heat.

“I didn’t wanna have to do this-“ he said and licked his lips as if in anticipation.

“Do wha-“ Dean began, but Sam had already lunged.

Sam hit him like a brick wall as solid pectorals crashed into his weakened and abrasive chest, whooshed the air out of his lungs. Dean yelled, shouted his brother’s name louder than loud and scrabbled for purchase on Sam’s goddamn moose shoulders, dug his bloodied dirty nails into flesh and bone as Sam flipped him sidelong, got a knee on his chest and shoved their groins together.

_Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck_

“SAM!” Dean growled, tried to shove his brother off and stop him before he touched anywhere near his junk.

Sam didn’t listen, just slammed Dean’s right forearm down against the motel bedspread and used his teeth to rip off the cap of the antiseptic lotion. He really began to panic then, the mingled concoction of ghost virus and his own deep-seated lust making his head spin.

All he could hear was the pounding of his over taxed heart, all he could feel the rush of adrenaline fuelled blood headed south in the worst reroute since he had decided to watch porn on Sam’s laptop in the too short time frame between his brother leaving to get coffee and him coming back fifteen minutes later and seeing Dean lose it to some college kid with shaggy brown hair and a dimpled grin.

Using the force he could easily exert over his brother, Sam used his height and strength to his advantage, monopolised the ghost illness that wrecked Dean’s body. Under duress, Dean breathed heavily, paused as shaky puffs of air left between his gritted teeth. He angled his hips away from Sam and tried to stay put as he let his brother spread aloe medicated ointment to the searing red ribbed pain of his arm.

“Alright’, made your point, Sam. Now get off, man. Get OFF!”

He tried to move his knee up to indicate the pre-emptive nature of him kneeing Sam in the crotch but instead barked a disgruntled sound of horrified surprise as Sam changed tactics and shoved his hand palm down against his neck, dug his nails into Dean’s stubbled and bobbing Adams apple.

Dean knew what Sam thought he was doing as he pressed him neck first into the mattress: that he worked to redirect the pain and pleasure that being scratched gave Dean by teasing that sensory release at another point on his body. Trouble was, being manhandled never failed to turn him on, and he really _really_ didn’t want to have to bullshit some excuse about why he’d popped wood because some ghost made his BDSM kink even more fucked up.

“Shut up, just lemme do the other one” Sam said sternly, bandaged Dean’s right arm like a pro with only one hand, didn’t make a peep at what must’ve been a painful ache in his ass from the ballet dancer pose he had going on to keep Dean pinned down.

“I can do it!” Dean demanded, voice gruff as he glared up at Sam with equal parts fear, arousal and anger.

Sam hesitated, caught Dean’s earth green eyes as he let his own kaleidoscope hazel flare wide at what he saw there. Dean’s stomach dropped and his heart stammered unsure and vaguely hopeful in his chest. He knew, surely, he had just figured it out.

The brothers held their gymnast’s entanglement for a heated too long moment: Sam’s knee on Dean’s sternum and one of his large slim fingered hands on his sweat slicked neck, the other tightened around gauze and medicine like a lifeline.

“Sam” Dean tried, swallowed thickly, recovered his voice from soft to firm.

“Let me go, man. I’ll do it, I swear, just lemme go”

Sam flicked his eyes over Dean’s face, rapid fire movements as agile as they were intelligent. Sam worked to decode him, to take him in as he strategized and stored away whatever information he thought he had seen in the ravaged flush of Dean’s face, opted to do with it God only knew what.

Dean watched his brother’s chest heave, watched the strain of Sam’s muscles beneath his tee-shirt and noted he’d taken off his overshirt somewhere between coming into the room and before he’d decided to imitate a WWE wrestler to overpower his ghost sick brother.

Sam swallowed thickly, let his shaggy bangs fall into his face and didn’t move to discard them.

“Sam” Dean said again, firm: a warning as much as it was a parlay.

“Sorry” Sam huffed, moved before Dean could even realise what had happened.

“SAM!”

Sam had thrown his weight down against Dean with added force and apologised through gritted teeth as he ground his knee bone so hard into Dean’s chest that Dean moaned high pitched and wounded like a pack animal, a wolf as it crooned at the moon.

“SON OF A BITCH!-“ Dean gasped for air, kicked at Sam now as his sudden fight or flight responses kicked in.

Sam was going to see it, was going to see the mark, would see the word scarred and mutilated into Dean’s skin and want to know what it meant, would want to know why Dean hated Angels when he had their name tattooed on him skin deep. Sam would never let it go, would never let sleeping dogs lie. It would be the end of Dean, the end of their brotherhood and the end of any chance Sammy had at being normal, would extinguish the flickering already narrowed taper of a flame Dean kept lit and ready for Sam, a chance at normalcy beyond anything the Winchesters ever had promised for them.

It was only then, as his lungs seized in panic and his body screamed out for release, that Dean remembered that Sam’s hand was on his neck, his strong gun welders’ fingers pressed inch deep against his throat. Sam seemed to remember it too, but a second too late. A second too late because Dean had already begun to spiral and black suddenly rose up to meet him.

Virus vs little brother rolled into its final round in the ring and Dean felt his grip on reality slide. Sam, too strong for his own good Sammy the nurse maid, had pushed his gasping frantic brother into unconsciousness.

The last thing Dean heard before the darkness fully incapacitated him was Sam yelling his name, felt the shake of his shoulders and the way his mark throbbed, and then nothing. Dean couldn’t help thinking that if Sam had been going to put him out, he could’ve at least made it worth his while.

=

Dean had woken up a few minutes later, rushed to sit up and then choked on the dryness of his own throat, rolled onto his side and dry heaved until he’d felt Sam’s massive hands on his biceps, had felt the push of a water bottle against his lips and a palm against the short razor-edged hair at the nape of his neck.

“F-fucking…DICK!” Dean gasped, swallowed water and apologies in equal measure as Sam gushed his sorrys like a man at Sunday mass.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t realise I was doing it that hard, man, I’m serious I-” Sam objected, rushed back and stumbled over his long legs when Dean geared himself up and off the bed and charged forward, only stopped short of throwing Sam through the cheap wood and metal of the door when he noticed the bandaged mass of his left forearm.

“I told you to leave it!” Dean said slowly, voice a dark tremor: took in the gauze and the smoothness of his previously gored arms.

“I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE IT!” Dean repeated, roared now as he charged forward and shoved his arm up under Sam’s neck. Shaking like a tree in a hurricane, he rammed his wrist, mark side up, up under Sam’s jaw, dug in the delicate sweat salted skin of his little brother’s throat.

“WHAT THE HELL, DEAN?!” Sam demanded, yelled in Dean’s face, didn’t push him off because he already felt bad that he’d knocked Dean out. That only made Dean angrier.

“I DIDN’T TOUCH IT! I SWEAR, I DIDN’T TOUCH IT!”

Sam begged off, put his giant’s hands on Dean’s forearm and hung on.

“ _Touch it?_ TOUCH WHAT, SAM?”

Sam gaped at Dean, his eyes momentarily panicked and his mouth hung open, rounded and soppy with saliva: a symptom resulted due to a build-up of an adrenaline response from their fight.

“Your wrist” Sam huffed, breathed rapidly.

He gentled his tone and gasped for air, stammered with objection when Dean shoved away from him suddenly.

Sam’s hand immediately went to his own throat and he breathed heavily as he leant, defeated and unhinged, against the door his brother had shoved him against.

“Your wrist” Sam repeated, careful, words a sign of treachery in bloodied unclear waters.

“I didn’t touch it, know you gotta- gotta thing about it. So, I didn’t touch it, I swear Dean, just bandaged your arm, didn’t even look”

Bullshit. Dean called bullshit. Stared at his little brother with his eyebrows loosened and drooped in despair, felt his eyes, red rimmed from strain and exertion, hollowed out from fear and anxiety, twitch as they gathered frustrated droplets of moisture.

“You didn’t _look_? Didn’t look at WHAT, Sam?” Dean ground his teeth to stop the tremors, had bitten his tongue and swallowed down iron.

“I don’t KNOW, because I didn’t LOOK!” Sam objected, used his goddamn puppy eyes on Dean like it was his very first day at the rodeo: like he hadn’t raised Sam from Adam and didn’t know what he looked like when he lied.

“You’re lying” Dean said numbly, huffed in disbelief and heard the hysterical half chuckle as it escaped from his lips.

He raised a finger up and wagged it at the air, opened and closed his mouth around half formed inconclusive thoughts when his heart had begun to stammer in his chest- baboom, baboom, baboom.

“You’re- lying”

“I’m not!” Sam insisted “I’m not, Dean!”

“Yeah, y-yeah, you’re lying, you’re lying, Sam! Why are you lying? Huh? Just admit it! Just tell me, tell me what you saw-“  
“I’m NOT!”  
“YES YOU ARE! You- you…are….you are-“  
Dean’s legs suddenly collapsed under him.

“Woah! Hey! HEY-!“

Sam rushed forward, pressed his offensive palm against the irregular rhythm of Dean’s heart as it worked to beat its way out of his meagre human chest. He held him up as his knees gave way beneath him when he again tried to stand. Dean yelled out in pain, couldn’t do it, couldn’t make it, would die here as Sam enveloped him in his arms, would die full of the knowledge that Sam only looked out for him out of pity, had seen his mark and knew that he was cursed, that he had lied to him and overshadowed him and ripped up the rule book of his life for decades.

“Dean! DEAN! Hey, hey, hey-“ Sam’s face floated into focus.

His eyes were feral and wide as his hands patted and shook his face.

“Stay with me man, stay with me, you’re alright, it’s okay, didn’t see anything I swear, gonna get you better, gonna make you okay- “

“Sam” Dean slurred, pinpricks of tears on his pale freckled cheeks as he clutched his chest, saw Sam’s tight tipped nose and his slanted pink mouth through a torpedo of tremors and quakes.

“Yeah, Dean, m’right here, come on, m’right here man, calm down, calm down, HEY, it’s okay- “

Baboom, baboom, baboom

“Dean?”

Baboom, baboom, baboom

“No, no, no, no! HEY! come on, no, no, no no! you can’t leave! not now, not again, not because of this!”

“Dean? DAMNIT, DEAN!”

BABOOM, BABOOM, BABOOM

“Please” broken desperation sobbed into the air.

“Please- please, no, please God no, please God no, I’ll do whatever you want, I promise- please, I’ll do anything!”

Sam prayed to God for him as he shook his rag doll of a brother and heaved dry sobs of panic into the skin of Dean’s ear, puffed hot entangled breaths against his eardrum so the only thing he heard apart from the pounding of his own heart was how quickly Sam’s grip on reality deteriorated. Dean resented his brother’s faith, hated it, wanted to make it a physical affliction he could pummel and destroy with his fists, but in that moment, he no longer felt fury or loathing, he only felt desperate and crushing sadness.

Sadness in the way that it was unmistakable, the kind of sad that when someone asked you how you felt you just shrugged, avoided looking them in the eye and said the word. Monosyllabic, poignant, all encompassing umbrella term that it was: Dean felt every facet of sadness a man could ever have felt, loss, grief, bereavement, despair, longing, anguish.

Sam wasn’t this emotional, not recently anyway, hid his feelings behind ever growing shaggy bangs and locked them up tight behind pursed lips and rolled back athlete’s shoulders. No, Sam Winchester didn’t cry, not unless it was life or death.

It was only then that Dean realised: he was dying. He had been too busy paying attention to Sam and hadn’t noticed the way his heart wanted to burst itself from his chest, hadn’t noticed until he heard the hitch of his brother’s stammered breath and felt the moistened skin of his neck slicken under Sam’s desperate cries.

Dean never wanted Sam to pray for him, never wanted Sam to look heavenward and send his idolisation and belief somewhere that wasn’t the opposite seat to him in the Impala. Dean hated Sam for believing, that he still put his trust and faith into a being whom apparently was real but as far as Dean could see didn’t give a crap about the Winchesters, least of all little Sammy Winchester: the psychic with a penchant for demon blood and a habit for sticking his hope filled self where he didn’t belong and meddling in things he should never have touched.

Supposedly, that made Dean one of those things. Sam should never have indulged him, should never have given himself wholly to Dean to love and care for and protect, should’ve known by the way Dean was that he’d handed himself over to a monster, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

John should’ve known at least, should’ve siphoned off Sam’s reliance on his big brother and hazarded a guess at how fucked up his eldest would become. Dean supposed John had had that realisation after all, but at twelve and eight years of age the damage had already been done, the only thing left to do to commit Dean’s future sins to the fatherly guilt and emotional trauma reflex he was known to exhibit: ensured Sam’s protection as long as Dean kept his little brother centred moral compass.

If Sam prayed to God then there was a chance the Angels would find him and if Dean was really going to be taken out by a goddamn ghost virus of all things, then the last thing he wanted was for the Angels to take his traumatised and broken brother away. Sam would never leave Dean without a fight and the Angels wouldn’t take to disobedience well. Sam had never obeyed once in his entire life and Dean didn’t expect him to. It would take a hell of a tragedy for Sam to do anything Dean asked of him, and Dean hoped Sammy never had to listen to him like that, to take his words as an oath, a pledge to keep on living.

“S-Sam, S-Sammy, stop- “

“Please, please, please- “

“S-Sammy- “

“Please God, please God-“

“Sam”

“…Dean? DEAN!”

A clammy palm placed itself on his cheek and Sam’s somehow still soft fingers gripped his jaw, angled his head to and fro until Dean used his last vestige of energy and slapped Sam’s groping hand away.

Baboom, baboom, baboom

“You’re okay, you’re okay, I’m right here, Dean, m’not leaving, I’m here, it’s okay-“

Sam had been stuck repeating the same mantra and his hands now flapped with insecurity, unsure if he should try and touch Dean again even if he suffered the consequences. Dean felt his adrenaline spike shove him sideways into reality, gasped a breath he’d previously lost to mania and heaved in lungful after lungful of stale oxygen. He smelled Sam’s perspiration more than anything but somehow he found that comforting.

It only took a moment but his brother couldn’t resist, sunk his hand down on Dean’s shoulder as it shook and pegged his fingernails into the seam of his tee-shirt, one that had once been grey but was now soaked through to black with sweat.

“m’okay” Dean wheezed out, voice gruff, an octave lower, didn’t feel like talking but knew Sam needed to hear him speak.

Baboom...baboom…

“God- Dean!” Sam began, exclamations prepared on his tongue.

“Don’t say that” Dean panted, interrupted, groaned and rubbed his chest, screwed his eyes up and then flared them wide as his nearly explosive heart calmed to a frenzied yet calmer rhythm.

“What? God?” Sam asked, delirious enough that he smiled through his panic, so relieved that Dean talked to him and responded normally that he couldn’t have cared about anything else even if he’d wanted to.

“Yeah” Dean responded with a groan, didn’t elaborate and expected Sam to take it.

For once, Sam did.

“Okay” Sam nodded, wide eyed, placated him and acted like what Dean had said was totally reasonable.

“Okay, wait there”

Dean waved a hand in a lazy, unfixed flap in Sam’s general direction, managed to haul himself painfully onto the motel bed again so that his heated, over exerted body could rest. He melted into the intense cool of the mattress, pillow and sheet a balm he so desperately needed, and closed his eyes.

Sam returned a moment later and Dean felt more than heard the vibrations of Sam’s heavy-footed steps as they paused by his side: allowed Sam to get his fill as he worried and hovered. Sam pressed a cold wash cloth to his forehead, held it there firmly for ten, twenty seconds, before he moved it to lay on the sweat damp and freckled crease of Dean’s neck.

“You’re a dick” Sam said after a beat, huffed his half-hearted tremor of humour through his teeth and waited for Dean to crack open an eye, wanted him conscious and looking at him.

Sam’s shoulders were bunched up to his ears, his face faded pink from red due to previously shed tears. In another reality, in another world where Dean was able to show his true emotions and physicality to his baby brother, he might’ve hugged him, even ruffled his hair. As it was in this universe, Dean shoved his elbow out toward his brother instead, swung his bandaged arm down a second later to point objectionably at Sam, grumbled:

“Speak for y’self, man handler”

“You wouldn’t listen!” Sam objected weakly, desperate to keep Dean wise cracking and not truly committed to fighting anything out.

Dean wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit either and so he grunted in response, let Sam fuss as he pressed the freshly dampened towel to wherever he pleased, closed his eyes to relieve himself of the nauseating yellow light of the motel’s rooms dollar store bulbs.

Dean let Sam take his fill, rolled over when his brother needled him to and groaned and hissed in pain when his heart threatened to palpitate again, stayed that way, a human vegetable, a marionette at Sam’s merciful control, until his brother seemingly decided that he was healthy enough. Healthy enough in a, you nearly died from ghost sickness but we’re still on a hunt so I’m begrudgingly going to leave you, sort of way.

Sam had prayed to save Dean and nobody had come running, had confirmed Dean’s already affirmed knowledge that the Angels wanted nothing good to do with his brother, that all they wanted from the Winchesters was for Dean to keep his brother in line, to get Sam to quit his extracurricular boozing and get himself squared up to the plate and ready for the damn apocalypse.

It didn’t take long after Sam left, comforting presence a hazy already dissipated memory in Dean’s illness clogged reality, for Lilith to come. She came in ribbons and baby girl pink and mocked him, told him she knew what he had done in hell and that she was going to send him spiralling back. Told him how she would tell sweet Sammy about his big brother’s awful secret and send him scrabbling on his knees to the messengers of his own destruction, how she would make Sam beg them to bring Dean back again and how doing that would ultimately get his little brother killed for his impropriety.

Lilith told him that he would always be the hand on his brother’s murder weapon, would always lead Sam to the chopping block, would offer him up on a silver platter because there was nothing he could do about a mark that tainted, a symbol of prophecy and death.

Dean could outrun death but he could never cheat it out of taking his baby brother.

Even though it had turned out to be only five excruciatingly painful minutes, his time with Lilith had felt like hours of hellish torment. There weren’t words to describe the palpable relief Dean felt when Lilith disappeared and he had been left alone to collapse broken and spineless with grief against the mottled dry wall at his back. When Sam and Bobby had destroyed the ghost of that ginormous soft hearted Lenny and ended Dean’s waking nightmare the fist around his heart unclenched deliciously, had left him sprawled across the floor, knees splayed open and face specked with spittle and desperate flecks of tears, had left him heaving grateful infuriated lungful’s of air into his body for the zillionth time since they’d driven up to Rock Ridge.

He breathed again now because of Sam, because of his smart, determined younger brother, and Dean realised he’d never known anything different. Sam had always thought that Dean was the one that saved him, but in reality, Sam did that for him more than he realised, saved Dean with hidden smiles reserved especially for him, saved him when he filled out the passenger seat and groused petulant and bitchy whenever he suggested diner food for the tenth time that week.

Saved Dean just by being there, by living alongside him, saved him when he shared crappy motel rooms and patched Dean’s wounds, saved him when he indulged in their inside jokes and gave clinging death defying co-dependent hugs. Gave Dean the greatest gift he had ever received just by being him, by being Sam.

Sam gave him everything even if Dean knew he was unworthy, had known it should’ve been some girl who witnessed his brother in those small moments instead of him, should’ve been someone like Jess who marvelled at the beauty of Sam’s smile and watched him with an ache in her chest because Sam was just so goddamn _good_ , because he personified everything she wanted to be, and unlike Dean, would likely grow to become.

The ghost sickness left him and Dean couldn’t do anything except hug his left wrist in to his chest and hold his brother’s death sentence against his heart, couldn’t do anything but wish that he was anyone else and that Sam had been born with half a chance in this world.

Sam returned as quickly as he’d gone and fussed over him so much that Dean snapped at him to stop and had suffered being on the receiving end of a wide eyed puppy dog look so intense he’d then grumbled and allowed his little brother the hug he desperately wanted, patted Sam on the back and then gripped his jacket hard, didn’t let him go until he shifted and tensed in his hold.

They had met up with Bobby after that and shared a beer and in Dean’s case, a mocking, before hitting the road again. Dean hadn’t been able to believe he’d been scared of his own baby and had groaned in orgasmic relief as he’d slid into the driver’s seat and run his hands over her stitched leather steering wheel.

Sam had rolled his eyes and called Dean a creep and he’d taken the jibe without comment, too full of adoration for their home on wheels, a home because it housed Sam, to have risen to anything.

=

It was only on the drive to their next hunt that Sam finally began to talk. Dean hadn’t said a word since they left, had shrugged off Sam’s questions about seeing hallucination Lilith and had told his deeply invested and nosy brother he hadn’t dealt with anything he couldn’t handle, hadn’t seen anything the great soulless husk that was Dean Winchester couldn’t squash down and recalibrate his brain to forget.

They’d passed several drive thru towns by the time midnight rolled around, endless flashes of red brick, cheap dry wall and peeling civilian paint, and Dean was more than certain Sam was asleep. His petulant questioning brother had his drooped shaggy rested on his arm and his arm on the passenger side door, he regularly puffed out clouds of hot air that heated up the Impala’s glass window and imprinted abstract illustrations of condensation like spiders webs against the chilled window pane and Dean was just wondering if he should throw some cold water on his brother before he overheated when Sam suddenly shifted. Dean jumped out of his skin at the motion, was so alarmed when Sam furthered his dramatics by flipping his eyes open and shoving himself upright that he jolted the car to the right and narrowly avoided hitting a goddamn fire hydrant of all things. 

“JESUS! Sam!” Dean cursed, shook himself and realigned the Impala inside the white markers of the road, glared at his sleep rumpled but apparently not slumbering little brother.

Sam just glared at Dean right back, shoved his mussed and sweaty hair out of his eyes and stuck his legs out as far as they would go into the too shallow for moose legs footwell of the Impala’s passenger seat, groaned when his knees didn’t even dip and bend, the space much too small and not allowing him to ease the cramp he no doubt had.

“Thought you were asleep” Dean commented into the silence, looked sidelong at Sam who was now busy as he preened himself in the droplet dotted blackness of his reflection, used the streetlights as a vanity and the window as a mirror.

Dean rolled his eyes, hard. Typical.

Sam was more obsessed with his hair than Dean was, used all kind of frothy girly smelling shampoos and even used honest to God conditioner, never even touched the two in one stuff dollar store stuff Dean used when he was out of freebie samples from motel bathrooms. He was convinced Sam’s luxury time in California was to blame, could remember a thousand times he’d scrubbed Sam’s grubby brown hair with plain white bar soap as kids, had even used dish soap on one memorable occasion when they didn’t have anything else. Sam’s hair had gone green with the colouring in the liquid soap and Dean had had a field day laughing his ass off as Sam tried anything he could to scrub the Christmas pine color out of his locks.

Sam had got him back for that though, hadn’t appreciated Dean’s endless mockery and had slipped neon pink hair dye in his shampoo, had known Dean didn’t look at the product he rubbed into his scalp and more times than not closed his eyes during the soaping process. The worst part was that Dean really hadn’t noticed: had just rolled out of bed and headed off to high school the next day, had walked unaware as Sam flogged his heels and they trudged the mile trek to the school yard. John had gone awol on some hunt now both boys were teenagers and it had been the norm for them to be alone more often than not: he hadn’t thought anything of it and Sam hadn’t let on.

Dean hated school, hated everything about, didn’t want to learn useless crap like trigonometry and similes when he could be saving people’s lives and making a real difference.

Up until that day Dean had had a reputation as a bad boy, a stud in a leather jacket with plush lips and a wicked tongue. After that morning however, Dean was known as ‘Malibu Barbie’. He’d left before the first bell had even rung and made Sam walk home alone for his troubles, had put itching powder in all of Sam’s underwear and never went to school ever again: became a high school dropout and waited gratingly for the Barbie throw up to grow out his scalp as Sam, the little shit, had used permanent dye.

“I was asleep” Sam shrugged, back in the present. Rubbed his eyes and frowned into the darkness beyond the Impala’s windscreen.

Silence descended again apart from the drone of AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ on the radio, volume set low so not to disturb the nap that Sam was no longer having. Dean didn’t know what to say; he was mentally exhausted from the illness, physically bruised from the fights he’d had with Sam and endlessly weakened by keeping up the façade he kept in place to appease his twisted sense of loyalty and regard for his deceased father.

“What’s with you lately?” Sam suddenly asked, broke the temporary reprieve of Dean’s thoughts with the tensed and quiet hush of his voice.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean asked right back, mildly offended.

“We keep fighting” Sam explained, chewed his bottom lip into the damp pink of his mouth and let it loose with a nasal sigh.

“Ever since you got back, we’re fighting more than we ever did”

Dean let himself be quiet as he digested that, let the silence of the nights ride rise up as it protected him from having to reply, then turned on the windscreen wipers.

“Yeah” he admitted “we have”

Nonchalant, noncommittal.

“Why?” Sam asked immediately, not satisfied.

“Is it something I’ve done? Is it because of Ruby? The-…the demon blood?”

Dean badly wanted to tell Sam to shut up, to drop it, but he let him vent. Sam got like this, stored everything up inside and let it build and build until he just exploded, a trait he’d learned from John and then no doubt Dean himself. The only difference between them was that where Dean wouldn’t let on that he was stewing, found other avenues to express himself and let off steam: drink, women, miles on the road, Sam would let slip is frustration, would snap and fizzle, would storm and jump around like corn kernels getting flighty as the first lick of heat hit their shells.

Sam was so easy to read that Dean found it laughable that he thought he had any mystery and anonymity. Dean had known this had been coming, this talk. Hadn’t been born yesterday and expected nothing less of his own personal trauma therapist: Sammy the ‘talker’. His baby brother had pouted and hypothetically tap tapped his foot for weeks now since Dean had risen from the pit and even though they’d spoken in stops and starts, they’d always dissolved into angry shoves and grunts and had had to be pulled away from each other by either Bobby or the seriousness of a case and had consequently never discussed anything.

It was true, they _had_ been fighting more than normal. Dean wouldn’t say he’d never roughhoused with Sam or given him a bruise to be whimpering about, but that wasn’t the same as now and they both knew it. Sam was no innocent either, had given Dean a run for his money several times, both literally and figuratively, dependant on if they’d bet on each other or not. The Winchester boys were no strangers to tough love, but the way Dean knew he’d been over eager to jump into the ring whenever Angels were mentioned hadn’t been fair to Sam and he was more than conscious of it.

Sam had kept pushing, kept prodding him and made him think about the mark, about his brother’s fate and the very real reality of the goddamn apocalypse and its host of heavenly dick bags and so Sam had been the focus of Dean’s frustration and anger and denial, had paid the price for it with skin and bone, with aching muscle and blood in the sink. He didn’t want to hurt his brother, didn’t want to lay a damn hand on him, but when Sam wouldn’t let things lie when he so badly needed him to, when he needled his way into Angel business and oh so happily laid his pretty neck on the chopping block? Oh yeah, Dean was gonna do whatever it took to keep Sam away.

“It’s not the blood” Dean wet his lips, looked at Sam and immediately looked away when he saw the hurt plain and pure on his features.

“Then what is it? Because I’ve been wracking my brains here, Dean and I can’t think of anything”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about” Dean flipped the indicator and turned right down a side road, scouted out a motel for the night. He was beyond beat and he did not want to have this conversation.

“Nothing I need to worry about? What is this, Hallmark?” Sam scoffed, eyebrows furrowed and sloped as he looked infuriated at his brother.

“Sam” Dean sighed, warned him.

“No, don’t do that!” Sam turned in his seat, faced Dean full bodied and vulnerable, opened himself up like he was a blossoming flower and Dean was his temperamental energy source.

“Don’t _do_ that!”

“You’re pissed at something and you’re taking it out on me!”

“And I get it, man, I get it, you hate the Angels and the apocalypse is scary, you’re pissed at me and you hate me for doing what I’ve done but- “

“I don’t hate you”

“…what?” Sam asked blankly, had lost his momentum in the starkness of Dean’s reply

“I don’t hate you” Dean repeated softly, avoided his brother’s intense puppy dog eyes and clenched his fingers snug against baby’s wheel. 

Motel, motel, motel, come on, motel.

“I don’t hate you. Just…hate what’s going on. We don’t know crap, Sam, we know nothing and they’re out there with all the damn answers and they won’t tell us anything. We’re meant to- to what? Avert the damn apocalypse because some stuck-up bible freaks told us so? Why? Why us?”

“Dean- “

“So yeah, I’m mad, Sam! I’m pissed! They want me and they really, _really_ don’t want you and that’s not gonna happen, It’s you and me, man. It’s you and me against the world or they won’t get a THING from me! I’ll let the whole world burn, Sam, you just watch me, let them explain it to the big man upstairs because I don’t care. I DON’T CARE! I couldn’t give a rats ass what they want!”

Sam stared at Dean as his gentle speech suddenly turned to rage, watched as his brother’s breaths came quick and agitated, warred with what to say or do. Dean didn’t want a response, not really, he just wanted Sam to quit asking. Of course he wasn’t okay, and yeah, he needed to stop putting Sam in the firing line of his anger, but Sam always liked to resemble a swiss cheese: offered himself up to be shot through with barbed remarks and bullet holes, never stopped even though he got hurt and Dean didn’t doubt he wouldn’t keep doing it.

Sam would put himself in front of whatever danger there was as long as Dean would be okay, even if that was Dean himself, and knew that his brother would do the same for him without a second thought. It was who they were, the two of them together armed and dangerous, emotional and wretched. Dean hoped Sam got it. He really hoped he did: that this wasn’t something he could discuss, that he needed to rip and tear and kill, to save and blaspheme and destroy. Dean needed destruction and immorality to live, knew nothing else and no other way to be: had never not annihilated whatever good he had in his life and was being worn thin from doing everything in his power to keep Sam’s expiration date from being rung up too soon.

Sam had bandaged Dean up, had applied Germoline and made himself duty bound to his big brother’s care: had nearly lost Dean because of some run of the mill haunting and he could see his little brother was spooked. Sam had already had to live without him for what Dean understood had been a dark and desperate four months and he never wanted Sam to have to go through that again.

He didn’t know if Sam had been lying about what he’d seen, didn’t truly see how Sam could point out he knew Dean was cautious and protective over his wrist and not sneak a peak at what lay there imprinted and branded onto his skin. The ghost sickness had made him dizzy with suspicion and diseased with grief and he honestly couldn’t have said for sure what words he and Sam exchanged in that dingy emotionally charged motel room.

The one thing he could ascertain though, the one thing he knew for certain, was that if Sam truly had known what was on his wrist, he wouldn’t have let it go. He would’ve been asking a million and one questions, would’ve been adamantly on Dean’s tale and researched and scoured every lore and mythology textbook he could find. So no, maybe Sam didn’t know, for now at least, but that didn’t mean that he could breathe a sigh of relief.

The apocalypse rested on his stooped and defensive shoulders and Castiel’s monotone voice with his grated warning ribbed itself against his brain with the intensity of a cheese grater. He had so much going on and if he was honest, fighting with Sam was just another thing he didn’t need.

His brother kept zip after that, stayed quiet and stewed all the while they scouted the streets for a motel. Didn’t say anything when they found a place to sleep, wordlessly collected their duffels when Dean finally pulled into the parking lot of a typical alabaster and red Motel6. Dean collected their keys from reception, burned out another credit card while he was at it, and took his time as he meandered back to the Impala and Sam’s patient and forgiving gaze, the gentle pull of an awkward closed mouth smile. He found a vending machine and kicked it until it spat out a Snickers.

He returned, chocolate wedged in his mouth, a clear ‘no talking’ sign, and unlocked room number twenty-four, shouldered his way inside and got busy as he tugged off his leather jacket and kicked off his worn-out boots.

God, his feet HURT. He’d driven for hours and it was the middle of the damn night, or morning, whatever wanted you wanted to look at it, and he was tired.

He heard the click and lock of the motel door as it closed and felt Sam’s height and width move behind him to the motel bed closer the bathroom: an unspoken agreement that Dean always take the bed closest the door in case of intruders, something that his brother indulged him in, enabled his need to protect him at every turn, even in slumber.

Both brothers got ready for bed with military precision, scrubbed their teeth until blood ran into the foam of water diluted spit, got into pyjamas but kept their boots primed and ready, laces loosened to slip on easily by the side of the bed. Lay down salt lines and kept dagger and gun under their pillows.

Dean had just exited the bathroom for the second time, had gone back in and washed his grime coated hair in the sink , had let the bite of the cold-water faucet shake off the grogginess of the nights drive to keep him alert enough that he would sleep and still wake if he needed to. He never let himself sleep deep enough to be truly rested, just enough so that it bridged the gap between night and day: kept him alive and kicking.

He presumed Sam would be in bed already, frou frou hair rollers in and sheet drawn up to his chin as he read a Mills and Boon erotica with the scandalised expression of a virgin in a strip club. What he didn’t anticipate was that Sam _would_ be in bed, but in _his_ bed. Or more on top of it, perched on the edge as he jiggled his leg agitatedly, eyes downcast as they burned an intense hole in the purple shag carpeting.

“What? Your bed not good enough or somethin’?” Dean mocked, scrubbed his hair dry with his tee-shirt and then threw it to whack Sam’s leg as it descended to the floor.

Sam didn’t laugh or even bitch, just turned his fingers in his lap and looked up, eyes open and knowing, hazel windows to his soul that bared all his insecurity and hesitance.

Dean looked down, bypassed the alarm bells in his head that told him he was going to be focusing on a space near to his brother’s crotch, and felt his heart give a cadaver like jolt in his chest as he zoned in on what Sam held in his long life giving fingers. It was his watch. The watch John had given him that Christmas, the watch with the two dials and the worn strap, the one with hole punched plastic scratched and stained from hunts, from seedy bars and life on the road. The watch he’d lost on his return from Hell.

“Where’d you get that?” Dean asked, stepped to move forward as blank eyes never left the watch for a second.

He didn’t stop until his knees pressed against Sam’s kneecap to kneecap, didn’t stop until only thin fabric of thrift store sweat pants separated them. His younger brother’s body tensed where it connected with his and Sam wet his lips, agitated, chewed on them and then expelled air through his teeth with the hurried grace of a sloth. Instead of responding, Sam looked from Dean and to the watch again with the haunted and gaunt look of someone who was reliving their nightmares greatest hits. He tightened his grip on the combination of gears and battery, of plastic and screws, and said nothing.

“Sam?” Dean pushed, shied away from bearing over his brother and instead sat next to him on the bedspread.

Tentative, he put his hands over Sam’s, thought about what would happen if he pried the watch from his brother’s fingertips but didn’t. Sam had kept it, must’ve done, and now wanted to return it to him with purpose, whatever that may be. Sam didn’t do things half assed; he must have had an agenda here, a speech or a lesson for Dean to learn. Dean constantly learned with Sam, never had a day where he didn’t expand his knowledge of his brother, didn’t add in annotations and revisions to the library of Sam in his mind, the countless volumes that made up the tomes of Winchester stored away inside him, reserved for him and him alone because nobody could ever know Sam like he did, could never even come close.

Dean held the standing title in expertise of Sam Winchester and he would never revoke his crown.

“I took it” Sam finally said, whispered it into the cup of his hands, reverent and unsure.

“I took it- after the hell hounds got you”

“You always wore it, didn’t- I couldn’t bury you wearing it, just needed to keep it I guess, like I kept the-“ Sam looked at Dean’s chest where the heavy weight of the amulet rested against his heart.

Dean nodded, a slight incline of his head, I’m listening Sammy, it’s okay, go on, and Sam continued.

“I didn’t mean to keep it after you came back, just you were so pissed at everything and I didn’t know when to bring it up”

Dean considered this, thought about the far and few times he’d had with Sam since he’d returned from hell when they’d had had a moment to themselves that wasn’t overshadowed by Angels or hunting. That early morning in Bobby’s kitchen maybe, but even he wouldn’t have tried to hand the watch over to him then, he’d been strung as tight as a bow and had been ready to snap at a second’s notice, had known he wouldn’t have reacted well four beers in and running on no sleep at the reappearance of the watch.

“Did you wear it?” he asked, found he had to know, wanted to know.

He imagined Sam with the press of old plastic against his veins, how he might’ve used the rhythmic tick of the clock hands to match time as his heart pounded in his chest, gave him life that Dean knew Sam hadn’t wanted when he’d been gone. He imagined Sam as he stroked his fingers over dent and worn away color and thought of him, imagined Sam as he had eventually taken off the watch when it had become too much, had become too heavy a reminder coupled with the horned amulet he’d also worn around his neck: a dead weight that pulled him earthward, down down to the ground but not deep enough to be buried beneath so that he could’ve joined Dean in hell.

Sam picked at the watch’s greyed strap and nodded, furrowed his brow and swallowed thickly, the movement audible in the hush of their shared space.

“Yeah” he said, quiet.

“Wore it until you came back. I had it in that hotel when you found me with Ruby. Had taken it off for bed and didn’t want you to see it so... I hid it”

Sam breathed out slowly, let the air expel itself from his lungs until he was forced to inhale again and turned to face his brother. It was then that Dean saw the dampness in Sam’s eyes, the forced calm and the anguish. Dean couldn’t do this if Sam cried, not again, too much hands-on physicality and shared feelings for one week. He felt like all they’d been doing since he got back was pinballing between numbly fine and excruciatingly bad: had been wet faced and barking barbed and poisonous words at each other more than they’d ever done in their entire lives.

A moment passed and then Dean felt the nudge of something against his fingers. He’d been staring at the grossly miscalculated aubergine coloured wallpaper that clashed with the floors deep purple carpeting, and hadn’t immediately noticed when the chink of plastic rode up against the skin warmed metal of his silver ring. He looked at Sam now instead of down and saw his brother’s arm outstretched, his body hunched and cowered as he gave over his bounty.

He gingerly took the watch and kept his gaze on Sam’s scrunched up button of a mouth, wished he could ease it into complacency, could trick it into that megawatt dimpled smile that always made Dean’s rotten and mangled insides whirr with contended happiness.

“Here” Sam said unnecessarily, just wanted to fill the space between their breaths with sound.

He let his fingers linger momentarily on Dean’s, the brush of his squared thumb against Dean’s ring finger and then he was gone, bundled his hands together and stuffed them between his legs, all but sat on them as if touching Dean had exhibited some horrid chemical reaction. Dean watched this with muted discomfort, swallowed down the way he wanted to force the issue with Sam, wanted to know why he felt like he had to duck and swerve and shrivel away from him like he was some noxious gas he’d die from if he inhaled.

Maybe it wasn’t that serious, could’ve just be a result of Sam’s own shame and disappointment in himself that stemmed from knowing he had been in his brother’s bad books, but as with everything to do with Sam, Dean took it personally.

Sam had taken the watch off him when he’d died, had taken it from his limp and bloody wrist and stained the whorls of his innocent’s fingers with crimson as he’d rescued it onto his own flesh. Sam had taken his deformed and shredded body and had washed him clean, had dressed him in fresh layers of tee-shirt and flannel, had squeezed his purpled ice-cold feet into worn in boots and laced them up with military precision. He had taken the amulet he’d given his big brother and had worn it against his own heart, had kept it round his neck rain or shine and buried Dean with the promise of a resurrection, was sure he’d find a way to bring him back.

Dean wished with everything it had been Sam and not the Angels that had brought him back, would have given anything to have found a loop hole that left them both in the clear, but life wasn’t that forgiving, and Dean wasn’t that naïve.

Sam watched as he tightened the watch strap against the bandage of his left wrist, hadn’t taken the wrapping off yet and didn’t intend to let Sam freshen the dressing any time soon.

“Thanks” he said, meant it and looked to Sam with gentle and forgiving eyes, hoped Sam saw what he wanted reflected there: understanding, empathy and peace keeping.

Dean knew what it was to lose his brother, had held Sam in his arms and wheezed broken sobs and tortured howls into his little brother’s chest and neck as Bobby had driven them away from the saloon style town Azazel had sourced for his psychic showdown. He’d slept with Sam that first night he’d lain there cold, had refused to let him be alone, had managed to trick himself into thinking he saw Sam’s chest rising and falling with renewed breath and had launched upright, screamed his baby brother’s name and shaken his shoulders, had screamed broken and gut-wrenching cries when his brother’s neck had rolled cadaver like on the mattress, hadn’t supported itself and just flagged up and down as he shook him.

Bobby had come running, had torn Dean off Sam as he’d yelled and bit, had restrained him round his chest and held him as Dean legs had given out and he’d sunk to the mould encrusted floor and watered the ground with his misery.

He knew what it was to live without Sam, and now his brother knew what it was like to live without him. They weren’t made for it, him and Sam. They weren’t built to withhold losing one another and the Angels and the demons and every goddamn monster that had ever shuddered in fear upon hearing the infamous Winchester name knew it too.

It wasn’t lost on Dean that Sam had given him the watch that John had: had re-gifted him his protection and invisibility and had enabled him by giving him the one tool he needed to keep up his lies and deceit. John had been the perpetrator, had instilled in Dean the importance of secrecy and loyalty, and now Sam had taken the helm as his dealer. He’d seen Dean as he’d itched with the need for his fix, for his token garment. He’d taken note of the fact that he was agitated and concerned over his wrist, had seen him button flannel sleeves like a business man’s lacky when before with the watch as his protection he would’ve rolled those sleeves up to his forearms.

Sam had said he hadn’t seen the mark and even now with his brother giving him the very watch that Dean used to manipulate and dismiss his queries, Sam didn’t uncover any lie or hint that he had in fact seen something. Dean couldn’t see how he hadn’t, couldn’t understand if Sam had washed and buried him and taken his shield off his wrist, how he had not seen the mark. But Sam was adamant, and Dean was tired. Tired of covering his ass, tired of second guessing the one person whom he loved and cared for above anyone or anything else.

If Sam said he didn’t know, then that had to be good enough for him.

“Thanks, Sam. I mean it” Dean said again, angled the watch so it nestled snug against his tendons.

Sam nodded, twitched a tight-lipped smile and ducked his head low, let his hair fall about his face in the way Dean loved and hated: hated because it hid Sammy from him unnecessarily but loved because it was the one childlike thing Sam had ever retained from his youth, loved because it always transported him back to shared car rides and motel beds pressed top to toe in bed to keep warm. It told him and reassured him that Sam, for all his trauma and grief, could still indulge in that one gentle and kid like tick: that he was still that little boy who followed Dean round like he could do no wrong and looked him like he had created the universe and sculpted himself just for him: arms the right shape to hug his brother close and smile just wicked enough to keep him enraptured and needing more.

There wasn’t much else to say, nothing they could verbalise that would encompass all that had transpired in the last six months and do it justice. Their relationship had been pushed to its limits and still had a way to go, was dependant on Sam and the choice he made with his powers and the choices Dean himself had to make regarding whether he helped the Angels with their apocalyptic master plan. The things coming at them had all the makings of ruining them, but Dean knew it would never break them: it could drive a wedge, could take them down different paths, but it would never keep him from Sam or Sam from him.

He wouldn’t let it. No matter what he had to do, he’d do it, pay whatever price was asked.

Dean Winchester was a soldier moulded in his father’s shadow and a man ignited to passion only by his brother. Sam on the other hand was a man complex of heart and empowered by morality: as much a foil to his big brother as he was the other half of his soul. They didn’t need dictation to understand each other, to see inside the other’s mind and know from a glance or a tender brush of joints what was going on inside the flesh and bone boundary of each other’s consciousness.

Human anatomy was nothing to the Winchesters, just another inconvenience that kept them from truly becoming one.

So, as they sat side by side, thighs pressed seamlessly together and shoulders locked in place, not a hairs breadth gap between their bodies, they felt right. They felt whole.

They stayed like that for a long time, just breathed each other in and allowed themselves the rare luxury of indulging in each other. Just the two of them. No girls, no monsters, no Angels or demons, no ties that weren’t the ones they had to one another.

Dean didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke up sometime around five AM, he found himself vertical and covered on the bed spread, his hand cramped under his cheek and his bladder pinched uncomfortably. He couldn’t work out what kept him there or why he was so warm at first: the blanket was beneath him and he wasn’t wearing a jacket: had gone to bed with the intention of sleeping in a tee-shirt but now felt as if he’d slept in a fleece lined jacket instead.

It was only when he managed to shove his way onto his right side and leant back enough to look over his sweat dripped shoulder that he realised that the impediment to his movement was Sam.

His baby brother was behind him on the narrow and sunken mattress, was balanced precariously with his gangly legs and broad shoulders on the precipice of the bed spread. His breaths came slow and even, his pink mouth open in a small O and his soft hair waved across his high forehead and tucked behind his ears. One arm was wedged beneath his head, a mirror of how Dean had slept a moment ago, and the offending anchor that had pinned him to the bed was Sam’s other arm, muscle toned limb possessively heavy as it kept him in place.

He couldn’t remember the last time he and Sam had willingly shared a bed, certainly not since they were kids and even them it was often under duress, at least from Dean when he grew into his pubescence and wanted some privacy, didn’t want his little brother pressed against him as he breathed hot against his neck and awakened all sorts of sick dirty wrong feelings in him.

Sam didn’t always sleep well, was so prone to nightmares and broken nights that Dean never knew how much the younger Winchester got to rest anymore. Certainly, it was more than Dean’s usual four hours but it couldn’t be more than six, definitely never broached seven and a solid eight would have been a miracle.

Sam must’ve put him to bed after he’d fallen asleep, likely against his brother, and then decided to risk Dean’s wrath and sleep beside him, perhaps emboldened by their having bonded over the return of the watch and their heart to heart in the Impala the night before. Whatever it was, whatever the choices behind it, Dean didn’t want to break the spell of its closeness, to have lost the feel of Sam against him, the warmth of his body and the security of his touch.

Sam had purposely put himself between Dean and the door that he always opted to guard, had taken that job away from his brother and put himself in the line of fire, selfless and tactile, always taking risks even when he knew he would get his ass beat to high hell when Dean realised.

In this case though, Dean settled back down. His heart stammered with insecurity and his bladder howled at him in frustration but he couldn’t do it: couldn’t shake off his brother’s intimate actions and go lie in a cold and remote bed when he knew the better, homely alternative was right there offered to him without strings or expectations.

So, Dean forced himself back to sleep, shunted himself back so that his back aligned with Sam’s front and felt Sam hum and shift. Felt Sam’s broad and heated hand, now on his stomach, twitch, his arm flex as it bent and tightened its lock on Dean’s body.

He was selfish, but he didn’t know how many times, or if even again, he’d get to monopolise Sam’s attention like this. One day, Sam would leave him, either by Angelic fury or through the life Dean was determined to ensure his brother got: would leave him for a girl and a dog and a front yard with a peach tree and neighbours who smiled and collected the local paper for you. And Dean wanted him to, wanted him to more than anything, wanted him to so much that he didn’t.

That was why Dean never put himself into the equation of Sam’s happy life, and why he was resolved to go out swinging if that’s what it took to reroute the soulmate mark and ensure Sam’s safety. Dean would never be able to be a part of Sam’s apple pie life, just wouldn’t be able to see the other half of himself make happy with some girl who looked at him like he was her entire world when Dean had literally sold his soul to ensure the world had Sam Winchester in it.

Sam was his. His soulmate, his baby brother, and he would never let him go. If it was the last thing he did, Dean had to get Sam in the clear and away from the threat of Angelic persecution, had to give him a chance to live beyond being damned by Dean’s ferocious and twisted love for him.

Dean slept with Sam that night and he didn’t allow himself to regret it in the morning, rose to the sound of Sammy brushing his teeth in the Munchkin landers bathroom sink and smelt fresh black diner coffee on the nightstand. He smiled to himself and reset his watch for the correct time, felt the world right itself and for the first time in months, allowed himself to close his eyes once more and drift off into dreamless, untampered sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a lot of work but I hope it's worth the wait! Things are building up for our boys and I'm excited to take you on the ride! ❤️ ❤️


	3. Misplaced faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A softer more humorous time for our boys that is set to be ruined when Sam finally meets the fated Angels he's heard so much about.

**October, 2008**

Since the return of his watch, his own personal cloaking device having been reinstated, Dean had felt calmer than he had in weeks. It had to be psychosomatic, the way the press of cool worn plastic and gears against his skin calmed his tremoring heartbeat and made him feel invincible and protected, but Dean found he didn’t give a rat’s ass, as long as the small hand-held device did its job: the job John had given it with military authority and sternness, the job that, with all good intent, his clueless hopeful baby brother had given it once more, had shunted its demoted state to a corner office and ripped up the retraction clause.

With the watch covering his mark, he was free. He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows again, sunned his pale freckled forearms and felt the heat of day when the light refracted through the Impala’s windscreen hit him just right. He tussled with Sam in friendly unselfconscious banter, ruffled his baby brother’s tangled brown Disney princess hair and barked a laugh when he got a supreme bitch face for his troubles. The mark hadn’t gone away, but distraction was like gold dust to a Winchester and Dean was no more immune to the temptation of obsessive fixation than his father had been before him. 

John Winchester had used the hunt for the yellow eyed demon as an excuse to not focus on reality: had used it so he didn’t have to comprehend that his beautiful wife was no more, that he was now a single homeless father with two young boys. A father to two sons: one barely able to lift his own head and the other wide eyed and shaken with trauma, voice stolen by the horror of his mother’s murder, one who only ever spoke when he thought John couldn’t hear him, who whispered tremors of comfort to his baby brother, whispered childlike affirmations pressed beneath a parental style kiss to the soft down of Sammy’s curl covered forehead.

“It’s okay, Sammy, m’here, they won’t get you, I’ll protect you”

Dean Winchester now used the same hyper fixation to avoid thinking about not only the soulmate mark inscribed into his flesh, but also the apocalypse, Hell and also the ever present longing he suddenly felt toward his younger brother. It had always been there, had always lingered beneath the surface, had curdled and boiled away and reminded him of the toxic and immoral poison that made up his being for decades now, but recently it had refused to lay side by side with his other squashed sensibilities.

Instead, even unprovoked, it rose up: flared hot angry crimson and gnashed it’s horrid teeth with want and desire when Sam bent over to shove whites and darks into separate washers at the laundromat, groaned and thrashed with an urgency to touch when Sam fell asleep, pink slim lipped mouth popped open, moaned with wantonness when Sam’s throat, mole kissed and slender, bared itself ready for the taking: begged to be claimed in order to allow Dean to ensure its protection and preservation, made him sick to his stomach with the way his lips wanted to skate over his brother’s pulse point and aggressively stop anyone presuming they had any right to Sam, that they even had a chance, like he hadn’t already bought out any and all possible stock in that department the second Sammy was born.

The watch was symbolic, was a tool in his fight against the many warring instincts that tried to take control of his body, and also had a tangible usefulness in order to keep Sam as far away from the truth as he could possibly be. Sam didn’t need to know what Dean thought about him in the hushed quiet of their shared motel rooms, didn’t need to know that he breathed Sam’s name into deflated and stained pillows or groaned it reverently into the hiss of the shower spray in whatever bathroom they were squatting in that week. 

Sam was better off not knowing, was so past being better off not knowing that even the meagre thought of his younger brother acquiring any brother lust knowledge had him wanting to jump off a bridge, made him want to kiss the jagged rocks with brain and intestine, paint the sea with all the colours of his putrid and tainted soul. So, yeah, the whole self-hatred thing was going great, Dean had it under control and his focus was back where it should’ve never meditated from: on his wavering, intelligently stubborn and darkness skirting baby brother. 

They’d had some sort of a breakthrough in that department, or at least Dean viewed it that way, was relieved and desperate enough upon hearing that Sam was going to stop using his powers that he’d closed his eyes and sent his first prayer heavenward. It hadn’t been a thankful rejoicing prayer, had instead been a scathing deadly warning, a pointed jab at Castiel and his battalion of dick-wad Angel freaks, a call to war and the feral swash of a white flag in a battle field already littered with breadcrumbs, all of them leading to Sam. 

Sammy was stopping, he had stopped, Dean had prayed, had spat angry and shaken in his mind, refused to clasp his palms together in devout submission. Sam’s gonna stop so you’d better stop too, you’re gonna stop before I tear every single one of you assholes apart with my teeth, before I flay the skin off your goddamn meatsuits and use your golden trumpets to impale you like it’s the alter you so badly want be on, you’re gonna leave him alone now because you don’t know what I’m capable of, you don’t know what I did in Hell, but I can assure you that if you did cross me? it would not be merciful if I ever got my hands on you. Consider yourself warned.

Sam told him that he wanted to stop for himself, not for Dean, but for his own benefit, and even if the possessive traitorous part of him felt dejected at his brother’s statement, the reality of Sam wanting to do something even vaguely adjacent to something that he had asked to do, something that would keep him safe from Angelic persecution and would lead him onto the path of virtue and morality once more, well, how could he be mad at that? Dean knew Sam better than he knew anything or anyone and he knew that his brother wasn’t evil, wasn’t a degenerate demonic tool, and was instead anything if the most holy and pure thing he had ever encountered. 

Not pure in the virginal sense, God no, he knew that ship had sailed, but pure in the manor of intention, of who Sam was at his core: how he was as unblemished and saintly as one could be, how even if he had darkness and trauma biting at his heels and even if he was worn down by their life and their losses, he would never lose that essence, the centre of what made him himself. Not that Dean would let him anyway, but he felt certain that Sam could never lose that innate unparalleled gentleness and hope, no matter what he went through or saw, he would always be a fighter, a guardian of the underdog and an inspiration to anyone who had ever wished they could be so unfailingly omnipotent in their capacity to love and care. 

Dean knew he would forever be in awe of it, and only mildly jealous. If any of the Winchesters deserved to be that way, full of light that always transpired against their warring darkness, then it was good it was Sam: right, fitting, perfect, even. Dean didn’t believe in fate beyond Sam’s belonging to him, but he believed in this tenfold, believed in his brother’s bright and impassioned smile like it was a deity he was privileged enough to commit his life to, would sell his soul a second, third or thousandth time if it ensured the continuation of the Sam Winchester dynasty. 

Sam hadn’t been as broody and grumpy as he had expected when he’d committed to his demonic mind power cleanse, and so far they’d been…well, good. They’d topped up their books with a simple salt and burn hunt in Boulder, a Grandma who really _really_ didn’t wanna give up her secret oatmeal raisin cookie recipe and who had gauged a chunk out of Dean’s leg with her possessed knitting needles, a hunt that had had Sam calling him ‘Captain Crochet’ for a week as he’d limped, pissed and disgruntled around the dive joints they needed to frequent to scam unsuspecting locals out of their hard earned cash and ensure their prosperity living on the unforgiving landscape of America’s roads and galleys. 

‘Captain Crochet’ had lasted as long as it had taken for Dean to stuff dead mice into Sam’s precious laptop bag and trail the cable cord behind the Impala like he was a cowboy with a rope lasso hanging behind him to snake the town miscreant across the dirt roads and burn his thighs to jerky. Sam had been furious, had yelled blue murder at Dean who, despite being injured, had insisted he drove, had swerved and jerked the car on purpose to make Sam angrier and disrupt the tangent of his tantrum, just to make a point. 

The general settled state of their companionship was that it was functional, it suited them both and had mellowed once more into a give and take routine of mutual understanding and intimate knowledge of the other’s bathroom routines. It worked, as it had for the previous three years since Dean had picked Sam up from Stanford, because for it not to work would be unimaginable: the two of them were two cogs in the same machine, were only crafted and sculpted to work against each other, to work in line as twin flames, yin and yang, or not at all. It was them or nothing and the more unexplainable big scale horrors crawled their way out of the pocked wood work that was their freak show of a world, the more they needed that Winchester two-in-one mechanism to work, to keep oiled and running without a hitch. 

Sam had been the most threatening component to their collaboration crumbling, and now he had decided to settle back and take the human tough grit high road as opposed to easy street demonic smoke shows, their lives were no more fucked up or endangered than they had been already. Or so Dean liked to tell himself anyway. Sam was always pushing, always testing his limits, and he kept dropping hints at Dean about Hell more often that not in the last week, kept eyeing him when they passed a grotesque mask that made him flinch before he could catch himself or dropped books he’d borrowed from the library entitled ‘trauma and how to handle it’ or ‘PTSD: something to share, not to hide’ onto the ratty table top of their motel research base. 

Dean had pretended to read one of those nauseatingly optimistic soul sucking books one time, had slipped a porno mag in between it’s covers and placed himself prime and centre for Sam’s viewing when he had come back from the supermarket. He’d hummed and ahhh’d and looked super invested and had felt Sam’s shock upon seeing him reading a self-help book turn to dewy eyed pleasantry and then- when he’d noticed the horror of a library book having been defiled, it’s dust cover removed and pen and oily finger marks (and other unmentionable fluids) on its paper- to disgusted fury. 

Sam had been livid, and Dean had howled he’d been laughing so hard. His younger brother was a stickler for library book etiquette and was appalled at the way Dean had maltreated the book he’d so caringly picked out and loaned for an entire MONTH, like they’d ever stayed in one place that long since they were kids. The petulant bitchiness of Sam’s sour mood hadn’t dissipated at all in twenty-four hours and in the end, with lots of loud objections about how stupid and time wasting it was, they’d bought BRAND NEW copies of the stolen library books, made copies of the library code stickers, printed, laminated and stuck them down, and Sam had slipped the books back into the library shelves with the satisfied sigh of a nerd in nirvana. 

They’d had to call upon their fake ID guy for those laminated book barcodes, and Dean hadn’t been able to look the guy, a man named Frank Pelatino, in the eye as Sam had gone over the seriousness of the lines in the code being just right, that the font and the appearance of the stickers had to be just perfect so not to arouse suspicion. Frank had bored his eyes into Dean with intense dislike at his bratty brother’s insistence he scam a goddamn library of all things, and Dean had paid him extra under the table, too ashamed to admit relation to a guy who cared so much about some middle-aged librarian noticing two books had gone missing off a shelf not previously touched or checked out in twenty years. 

So yeah, Sam was on his tail, but Dean had been doing a grand job of shaking him off as late and he had no intention of laying himself open and baring himself full frontal to his baby brother…as if that wasn’t an intriguing enough mental image on its own. They had shaken off the remnants of psycho knitting needle granny and with pockets lined with the spoils of drunken halfwit bar patrons, they were now on the road again, gunning it down State Highway 119 and out of Boulder, away from Colorado and on to wherever they so pleased. 

It was gearing up for Halloween and the route they drove reflected that: Jack O Lanterns populated suburban doorsteps, sketchy hangman props swung from children’s abandoned treehouses, string lines of fake ass spider webs clung to foliage and Dean’s favourite Halloween candy made its way back onto supermarket shelves. He’d made them stop at the first store they’d seen along Highway 6, had nearly taken out some teenage miscreants who’d been lounging on the low wall of the shop front with the way he careened Baby off the major road and swung her diagonally backward to ensure they made it onto the asphalt of the store parking lot. 

Sam had sworn his pretty lil head off and Dean had parked the Impala with a smug flick of his wrist and a buoyant spring to his step. His brother had been reading, one thumb gently smoothing over paper as his brow furrowed and he digested whatever nerdy ass thing he was consuming, and his other hand had held a paper cup of moderately hot vanilla coffee from a gas station an hour in their rear-view mirror. The coffee had spilled onto the seat of Sam’s thrifted jeans and he’d bolted upright hard enough that he’d whacked his temple on the roof of the Impala, had nowhere to go that wasn’t a hard unforgiving angle as his legs and elbows flailed, head throbbing with pain and coffee still spilling its offerings onto his thighs as he moved. 

Dean was anal about the Impala’s cleanliness, sure, but the coffee hadn’t even got on his Baby at all, and it was so worth the risk factor to see Sam’s prissy bitchy ass scowl as he cursed at him and stormed off to the store rest room followed by the cackles and whistles of bored small-town teenagers. The stomach ache he’d inevitably got from scarfing high fructose E numbered candy was painful, but so worth it, and it wasn’t even the proper Halloween season yet, there was going to be plenty more calorific treats to waft under Sam’s nose whilst he preached about healthy eating and fibre intake. 

It wasn’t unbeknown to Dean that his brother wasn’t huge on the whole Halloween thing: just like he was iffy about Christmas, Sam would rather wax nostalgic and melancholy than try and make the holidays into something more festive and cheery. Dean didn’t want to stay rooted in the past and even if he lived the consequences of his Father having done so, he didn’t see what was so wrong about enjoying a little candy and some wannabe cheerleaders dressed up in frustratingly short skirts. It was a sign that they were doing their job right, that these people still marvelled at the horror of monsters and laughed and boozed the night away dressed up in half assed costumes, it was because of hunters like them that the general public were clueless, could smear fake blood on their chests and never know the feel of a Harpy’s claw ripping their shin open, or how it felt when a ghost infiltrated your lungs with their ice cold and penetrating presence. 

His brother was usually the one to find a positive spin on the events that transpired in their lives, but it seemed that petulant dismissal was all Dean could drive out of his brother that Halloween, and would likely be all he could shake out of him for the foreseeable future. The only holiday they’d celebrated recently had been last Christmas, and that hadn’t exactly been jolly with the threat of Hell hounds snapping at his heels. Had been a drunken mess of old games on the grainy TV set and a poorly judged game of strip poker that had left Dean curled over the toilet in his boxer shorts and one lonesome sock. 

Sam had faired only slightly better, had been asleep on the grubby carpet of the motel room in only an eggnog stained tee-shirt when Dean had found him the next morning. Dean had stood there swaying and hungover, head tilted and fuzzy mouth open, for way longer than necessary as he tried to decipher whether Sam was wearing skin tone underpants or was in fact, mooning him. He’d eventually slapped Sam’s ass to get his answer and had fallen gracelessly behind the ratty motel couch when his palm had met bare flesh and his brother had jolted awake, hunters’ reflexes on addled alert before he’d scrambled to cover himself up. The closest thing to a blanket that he’d been able to find was Dean’s leather jacket and it wasn’t before Dean had seen both Mr and Mrs Clause, and even Rudolph, flashing him good morning.

The only thing Dean had been able to think of the next day was bacon, greasy eggs and the groggy undeniable fact that Sam’s junk had been against his jacket. It had been very hard not to stare as he fingered the Sam infused leather and sat across from his hungover and grumpy baby brother, tried to drown himself in cheap diner coffee and not think about Sam’s ass, but when he’d later had to hold Sam’s sweaty hair off his green sheened forehead as he’d ralphed up his eggs in the diner restroom only minutes later, hungover disgust and nausea washing through him, he’d figured he was over it. 

He would never be over Sam though, that was his mistake, and it was that not getting over him, and his unsatisfiable need to make his brother smile, that led them to the W.A Gayle Planetarium in Montgomery, Alabama a week and a half before Halloween officially tolled its spooky bells. They’d checked in to a nautical themed motel with anchors, fishing nets and sea glass strung around the walls on fishing line, apparently worthy of an extra $10 a night for the ambiance of the decoration, and had showered in a standalone shower spray painted to look like you were washing in the ocean, before they had left to go hunt down some grub after having been driving for 36 hours without any more than a bathroom break and water bottles chucked over their scalps and necks to keep them smelling half decent. 

Neither brother had wanted to spend more time in that nauseatingly comical and embarrassing room than was necessary, and so, after ensuring they’d eaten their fill, Dean of burgers and fries and Sam of a totally un-filling airborne salad and a skinny bowl of chicken broth, they’d kept on the road: no case lined up and for once at a loose end, no Angels, no demons, no interruptions except the ones they invoked upon themselves. 

Dean wasn’t one for words, wasn’t one for spouting spiritual or emotive lyricism unless it was a life-or-death situation, a last words kinda deal, only broke that rule if Sam had been particularly crafty and worn him down enough, had flinted enough spark to set off an explosion of raw emotion that he had been trying to control and keep inside. Dean reacted with actions, with purpose, with lives saved or beer’s drunk. He was a tactile physical communicator, and that was where he shone. He could flirt and seduce the clothes off any woman he wanted, but it was only a step on the ladder to where he really prevailed: speech and linguistic qualities were Dean’s salt and lime, a garnish he whipped up to improve the quality of what was already on offer, whereas with his brother open and honest communication were Sam’s bread and butter. 

Sam was always up to talking, couldn’t go through the day without dissecting words and analysing tone and inflection, particularly Dean’s. Sam paid close enough attention to Dean that it felt as if he were gunning for a Masters in his specific language, that he wanted to become fluent so badly that he would write a thousand essays, transcribe a million documents and listen to enough worn through cassette tapes if only it could help him get even an inch closer to full linguistic clarity in the church of Dean Winchester. 

The issue arose however whenever Dean wanted to do something for his brother that generally required more words than he was prepared to divulge. For instance, when Dean had seen the grey and green sign that marked out the path to W.A. Gayle Planetarium and had eased the Impala up off the hard shoulder and onto a snake’s labyrinth of smaller countrified side roads, Sam had immediately begun to question him. They weren’t on a hunt, sure, but heading off the highway and bypassing several decent looking liquor stores to go country hitchhiker, wasn’t usually Dean’s MO. 

Sam craned his neck to look out the Impala’s windscreen, his eyebrows jagged as mountain peaks, one up, one down, as he tried to comprehend his brother’s sudden boy scout mentality, tried to ascertain what could’ve possessed Dean to make such a decision. He glanced at Dean questioningly and then when his brother didn’t show any signs of response, pursed his lips and huffed out a slow breath so taxed that Dean had to bite back a grin. 

“Dean”

“Mm?”

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, just thought we could get some fresh air, that’s all Sammy” 

Dean flicked the indicator and the Impala trundled over a speed bump fast enough that it jolted Sam’s knees against the hard plastic shell of the glove compartment, caused cassette tapes and five-year-old jerky to fly out onto his lap. 

“Woah, watch it! Those are precious!” Dean snapped, eyebrows shooting up as he glanced over, reprimanded Sam to be careful with his aged music collection. 

“More like antiques” Sam scowled, recovered the cassette tapes with more care than his voice digressed and fearfully sniffed the jerky, gasped and coughed an ‘eugh!’ into his elbow when the pong of out dated air dried meat assaulted his nostrils. 

“Dude, you’ve _got_ to throw this out!” Sam chucked the jerky onto Dean’s lap and shoved himself against the Impala’s passenger window, cranked the window down to get some fresh air. 

Dean picked up the jerky with one hand, sniffed it and took a bite. 

Chewing hard, the meat old and tough as old boots between his teeth, he shoved the offensive ball of meat to one side of his mouth, tried to pretend he didn’t want to spit it out and grinned at his brother. 

“What? Why?” he asked, muffled and fighting the urge to gag. 

Sam looked disgusted, but he snorted nonetheless, grumbled something about Dean being sick and looked away just in time for Dean to wind down the window and catapult the aged meat out of his mouth and out to the forest floor, narrowly missing hitting a pissed off squirrel. 

“Seriously man, what are we doing here?” Sam asked again, watched bemused but also sceptical as Dean downed the last of their water supply and tried to wash the aerated tang of beef from his tongue. 

“Guh” Dean breathed harshly, swallowed down another half-litre of stagnated water and winced as the jerky tainted liquid slid down his gullet. 

“What do you think we’re doing here?” he asked, pointed to another one of those grey and green signs that identified the Planetarium whose parking lot they were now drawing into. 

Sam rolled his eyes.

“I know _where_ we are, Dean, that’s not the point. I meant, why? We’re not fifth graders on a school field trip”

“What? You mean geek boy doesn’t wanna explore the universe? Y’know out in space, no-one can hear you scream” Dean smirked, angled his head to look over his shoulder as he reserved Baby into a white marked parking spot, it’s length a hair too short, not made for the bulk of classic cars so much as smaller KIA’s and sleek snub-nosed BMW’s. 

“Nice. Mature” Sam said, looked out of the window and frowned when he saw a coach full of a middle schoolers hopping ship and rushing into the lobby of the Planetarium entrance. 

“Come on, man” Dean cut the engine and turned to his brother, leant an arm on the back of the seat’s bench and squared Sam up, knew he was one side step away from a bitching little brother. 

“We’ve got a day off, I saw this place and thought, hey, you know who likes all that space crap? My little brother. So. We’re here, get on board astro-nerd”

Sam considered this with reserved scepticism, his jaw ticking as he tried to see the ridicule in Dean’s words and actions. Dean kept his face neutral, a closed lipped ‘we’re going even if you hate it’ smile on his face, his eyes flat, closed off mirrors, and eventually Sam’s resistance began to wane. 

“So…we’re here for me” Sam calculated slowly, his brows furrowed, a small dip at the top of his nose.

Dean wet his lips and shrugged, looked away from Sam’s burgeoning soft expression. 

“No need to get all chick flick on me, just saw the sign and thought why not? We deserve a day off” 

“That’s rich, coming from you” Sam commented back with a snort, but he seemed softened by the kindliness of Dean’s gesture, his gentle hazel gaze focused on Dean with admiration rather than distrust. 

Dean wasn’t one for words, no, he was a doer, a man with a plan, a man inlaid with action not emotive reaction, and so he hadn’t been looking for a reaction from Sam, or he thought he hadn’t been, but seeing his brother shift from disgruntled wariness to barely hidden interest and enthusiasm, well, maybe he wasn’t as inept at emotions as he first thought. Seeing Sam find a glimmer of joy in anything these days was a rare and spectacular treat, and Dean found he lived for those moments, for the times where the burden of the hunting life, of grief and loss and morality, slipped from his baby brother’s shoulders and allowed him a glimpse of the true Sam: intelligent, sarcastic, morbidly curious, empathetic and stubborn, Sam. 

Imperfect, but perfect to Dean despite all the little isms that sometimes made him want to slam his brother’s face into the ground or shake him until his petulant do-gooder ass saw some sense. Perfect in his imperfection, would always be seen through rose tinted glasses despite how much Dean tried to shake the blind sidedness that he had when it came to his brother: knew he needed to, needed to find a way to not make his reliance and need of Sam so obvious, knew that the handful of times it had been used against him already were unforgivable rookie mistakes he couldn’t afford to happen again, especially with bigger and badder threats stepping up to the chess board each and every day. 

Sam smiled, a pull of cheek and a flash of white teeth, before he nodded, ducked his head and smiled again, a more secretive smile that had Dean wondering what Sam thought he’d just worked out, what was so amusing or delightful that he had to huff his laughter into his own chest and keep it a secret. 

“OK” he said, raised his eyebrows and set Dean with that crooked pursed lipped grin that made him look like he was chewing on something, his bemused but biting back joy smile. 

“Let’s go” 

“Damn right let’s go” Dean agreed sternly, nodded to himself and then suddenly floundered when he found he couldn’t find the handle of the Impala’s drivers side door with Sam staring at him , suddenly so agreeable, kicked himself in his urgency to get out the car and stumbled over the pack of jerky that had fallen off his lap and onto the asphalt. 

They regrouped round the front of the Impala and after safely depositing the jerky in the nearest trash can, they headed into to the expansive white and teal painted interior of the Planetarium’s entrance hall. Its ceilings were high and sloped and strung with space themed streamers, miniature planets swung down from invisible wire made from papier mâché at least as old as Sam with faded paint and one particularly depressed and droopy ring around Saturn’s jaundice coloured orb. 

Sam gave him a ‘here goes nothing’ glance and followed him as they approached the ticket desk and bought their admission. There wasn’t a great deal to do there, but the very helpful and busty receptionist named Sheila behind the front desk was very inclined to tell Dean about the darkened largely empty auditorium they had with the reclining seats and not much flow through traffic. She also mentioned with a well intoned wink and chewed lip that there was a telescope in the tower outside where you could see the stars of your zodiac and where, if you angled the telescope just right, you could even find love amongst the constellations. 

With an awkward dismissal of the clerk’s very clear sexual innuendo, Dean had hooked Sam’s elbow and steered him away, used him as a shield and an excuse, had made up some bullshit lie about it being his baby brother’s birthday and all but stormed away head down, tail between his legs, claws into Sam’s flesh. Sam had been confused but he hadn’t said anything, was so used to Dean being hit on and so unused to them having any quality time together that he kept zip, supposedly wanting to see where the crazy nuance of Dean declining sex and then spending the time with him in a Planetarium would take them. 

They’d pocketed their free leaflets that Sheila had slid them sensually over the counter and had dipped in to the on-site café to order coffee and doughnuts, sugared for Dean and glazed for Sam, before they ducked in to the back of a forty-minute showing on the solar system, occupied two leveraged seats that sunk back and down when they sat in them. 

Sam was so long legged that his boots were barely an inch off the ground even with the seat tilting him backwards and Dean felt like a Munchkinlander with the way his legs, bowed as they were, still stopped a good three inches short of the foot of the reclining chair. 

Sam noticed, coffee cup pressed to his lips precariously to take a sip and smirked at him, sniggered a laugh into the rim of the plastic coffee lid and then huffed a laugh more openly when Dean glared at him, cold blooded murder in his eyes, and told him to shut his damn mouth. 

Dean felt surreal in that moment, like when they were kids who had snuck off to the movies when Dad was out of town, used the money Dean had made mowing lawns and hustling pool with an illegal ID so that they could afford the good movie theatre boxed candy and splurge on the balloon sized popcorn bucket, two Icee’s as long as their forearms, one red, one blue. 

To be doing something so far afield from their usual hunts, something just for them and not for the benefit of clueless civilians or self-important Angels, it felt right in such a way that also felt awfully wrong. They had been trained from childhood to put the job first and anything else second, a rule that Dean had broken time and time again by always putting Sam first and throwing anything and everything else cascading wildly into the wind, thrown away, unimportant and dismissed. 

They didn’t do this, didn’t indulge themselves often, less and less since they had been together since Stanford with the ever-present threat of finding Dad and yellow eyes having overshadowed everything, had then been swiftly followed by monsters and psychics, by soul exchanges and Hell fire. To spend time with his brother without the press of outside forces and influences, well, if Dean believed in a Heaven then that would be what he’d describe. 

They sometimes drove into the middle of nowhere, just parked Baby up in a random field, sat on her hood, cracked a couple of beers, low-cal for health-conscious Sam, and watched the stars as they winked and dazzled overhead. They never talked about it, never planned it out, but sometimes they just knew: just glanced over at each other and silently agreed, touched fingertips over the passing of a roadmap or felt the tremor of ‘shall we? Should we? We should?’ flavour the air, an intimate psychic connection without the reality of it being so, and Dean would silently turn them off the interstate, would drive all night if he had to until they found a suitable place to park, somewhere unobscured by man made distraction, somewhere where the stars burned bright and pure, somewhere where the Winchesters with all their trauma and malcontent, could find peace. 

This was almost the same, he supposed, sitting now in a Planetarium auditorium, legs elevated and back hugged by the worn leather and cushion of a seat well loved by locals and school children alike. The show had already started when they’d snuck in and after some hushed hisses by other patrons as they’d sipped their coffee and swallowed their doughnuts practically whole, unhinged their jaws like snakes in their rush to gobble them down and get settled in time for the lights to go down and the projected show to truly get underway. 

The auditorium speaker who had been introducing the show now stepped away and the yellowed lights above them blinked out to nothing. Out of reflex, Dean immediately looked sidelong at Sam, didn’t look away until his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the black and he could make out his brother’s outline, the shimmer of his cheekbone and the tip of his nose. Safe. The ceiling above them glowed blue and then strikingly white, a supernova flash before it suddenly blacked out again and pinpricks of starshine picked their way out of the darkness, random bursts of light that had Dean’s eyes dotting, Rorschach test ink blots that mutated and bled behind his eyelids. 

Music, ethereal and classical, filtered out of hidden speakers, surrounded them with calm and elegance as the stars projected above their heads began to move. Dean watched closely as they whirled and danced and rearranged themselves into constellations: into Orien’s Belt, Ursa Major and Minor, suddenly morphed into zodiac constellations just as quickly, allowed Dean to spot Sam’s stubborn Taurean bull and his fluid and ever-changeable Aquarian star splayed across the man-made night sky. 

Sam was riveted beside him: his head cocked as he listened to the speaker inlaid in his seat, his hazel eyes moving rapidly as he took in the fast-moving stars that flew overhead, his scholars brain forming questions and observations in rapid succession, his mouth un-pursed and parted in an allowance of childlike wonder, hands loose and relaxed in his lap. Dean watched his brother more than the stars, hoped that the darkness of the room and Sam’s intense focus meant that he wouldn’t be called out on it. He tried to listen to the informative dialogue of the presentation, but he couldn’t concentrate: knew he was lazy and unfocused, but he wanted to take this in: wanted to remember Sam like this, wanted to treasure every goddamn moment he had his brother safe, unbloodied and secure by his side. 

Sam smiling, Sam full bellied and content, Sam in his nerdy element learning and thriving, inspired and motivated by something that wasn’t the thrill of the hunt, the allure of darkness or the compulsion of saving people. This was how his brother’s life should’ve been, full of science and books and research for the sake of knowing, not with some plebian’s life on the line. Eventually, Sam had noticed him watching, had glanced over and then away and back again when he’d seen Dean’s focused gaze, had expressed the glimmer of a frown before he’d smiled, one cheek pulled up and his eyes gentle and knowing, had let Dean take his fill of him before he’d ducked his head, shy, insecure, and looked back up to the stars. 

As much as his baby brother staring adoringly at the heavens irked him in ways he knew were irrational and unrelated to space travel, their venture into civilian normalcy and shared experience wasn’t unsuccessful, if anything it was the best decision they’d made in years, had given them a breath of fresh unstinted, monster free air, had allowed them to recharge and rejuvenate their working and casual relationship after so many outbreaks of fisticuffs in recent weeks, had given them pure un-adulterated memories to take forth with them into the garish nightmarish light of the looming apocalypse and whatever that may bring for them. 

The music was very relaxing in the auditorium and with the warmth of the underfloor heating and his closeness to Sam’s ever present radiation of body heat, Dean had slowly been lulled into a slumber that had stolen him within seconds of his eyes slipping closed. He awoke half an hour later to Sam’s hand gently shaking him, his brother looking bemused and kindly concerned. Dean usually never let his guard down, especially around his brother, and he was all at once furious and embarrassed. 

“What happened?” he asked dumbly, looked around the auditorium to see it empty and well lit, a cleaner in the corner brushing crumbs into a pan with a long-handled broom. 

“You fell asleep?” Sam answered blithely, smiled at Dean when he wiped drool off the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. 

Dean grunted and turned on his side, angled himself left and right and then with a groan righted himself into a sitting position. He rubbed his hands over his face and through his hair and then swung them down, slapped them on his thighs and fixed Sam with a wide eyed ‘I’m awake, I look awake? I’m awake’ gaze, mouth twisted in a caught-out pout of insecurity. 

“What? A man can’t get some beauty sleep?” Dean defended, pushed himself achingly to his feet and avoided his brother’s put upon and amused expression. 

“You were snoring” Sam grinned, bit his cheek when Dean scoffed loudly and pushed his way in front of him to get to the auditorium doors. 

“No, I wasn’t!” 

“Yeah, you were!” Sam insisted calmly, caught Dean up at the exit and followed him with his large hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, still smiling at his brother’s obvious discomfort. 

“I do NOT snore!” Dean snapped, put his palm up haltingly and glared at Sam just as a kid exiting the lobby’s adjourning bathroom gasped in glee and pointed at him. 

“Look, Mom! There’s the snoring man!” the kid yelled in declaration; his mother horrified beside him. 

Sam convulsed in silent laughter as Dean’s face went a solid brick red in defiant humiliation. The kid’s mother hurried to apologise and laugh it off and as Sam laughingly said it was fine Dean instead stormed, head down, to the door that would lead them out of the main building and to the telescope of prophetic love or horoscopes or whatever, he really wasn’t paying attention, he just wanted out and away, mortified beyond belief. 

His brother found him outside standing hunch backed and smouldering under a light spray of rain, his hands dug angrily in his pockets and a gritted angle to his jaw as he swore colourfully at the squirrels dancing around the nearby trees and chittering loudly. 

“Dude!” Sam said pointedly as he approached, jogged the last few steps and stopped at Dean’s side with the clomp of boots and a dispel of breath. 

“You didn’t need to _run_!”

“I didn’t _run_!” Dean scowled, bristled and pressed his shoulders up to his ears defensively. 

“I didn’t! I walked…with style”

Sam raised an eyebrow, pressed his teeth together so his dimples set in, didn’t believe him for even a second. 

“Riiight…whatever you say, Hasselhoff”

“Hey! If anything, I’m Pamela, P.A all the way, dude” 

Sam rolled his eyes, exhausted with his brother’s ineptitude, but he snorted nonetheless. 

“Come on” he said, angled his head toward where the peak of the telescope tower could be seen the other side of an expanse of neatly trimmed lawn and rectangular tidy flower beds. 

“What?” Dean asked, clueless, looked past the tower and around himself in an exaggerated circle. 

Sam couldn’t mean the love telescope, surely? The one busty Sheila had exaggeratedly come onto him about? It was obviously a spot for lovers, for gooey eyes romantics looking to see some prophetic meaning amongst the stars, and yet here his brother was looking at him expectantly, as though it was a given they’d visit it, like he hadn’t been stood by his side as the receptionist had rambled on and on about its importance to lovers and horny teenagers alike. 

“Come on, man, we came all the way here! we might as well go to the two attractions this place has”

“That lovers paradise over there? Really?” Dean pushed, goggled at his brother’s plain optimism. 

Sam pursed his lips, expelled a breath through his nose and looked to one side. 

“It’s a telescope, Dean”

“Yeah! A hook up telescope! ET phone home for a good time, THAT kind of telescope!” 

Dean watched as Sam’s shoulders rounded with tension and his jaw ticked with annoyance and his defiant objections died on his tongue, shrivelled up and tucked themselves down his gullet as he saw retrospectively how his bringing them there to have a good time was now being ruined by his obstruction of said fun times. 

Sam wanted to do the love telescope? Well then, they’d do the love telescope! Sam didn’t know that he was mated, hell, he knew nothing, and Dean really hoped the love aura around the telescope was just folks exaggerating for effect and not because there really was some witchy voodoo going on up there. It would be just their luck if there was. He would just have to suck it up and stuff it down, act normal and not like it was psyching him out to do lovey dovey stuff with Sam, his brother who was his predetermined soulmate, and not in the familial friendship way, no, in the romantic soul mark kind of way. He’d wondered idly one time if he’d been freaking out for nothing, had questioned why he’d automatically assumed the mark meant romantic soulmates, but one very tense and awkward conversation with John and one equally horrible phone call with a free clinic doctor, had put those hopeful ideals to bed. 

It was romantic, and Dean would be fooling himself if he said he didn’t see Sam that way, didn’t lust over him in his running shorts or want to grab his bratty petulant face in his hands and kiss the stubborn out of him when he was rampaging about the greater good or something stupid like why dill pickles on a burger weren’t a healthy swap for cucumber slices. 

“Alright!” he threw his hands up, couldn’t take the way Sam disappeared into himself and began to hammer and barricade the walls around his joy: couldn’t bear the thought of being shoved out of Sam’s psyche any more than he already was, in the way be probably should be, but couldn’t ever allow himself to indulge in seeing come to heartsick lonely fruition.

Sam looked startled at his brother’s sudden enthusiasm but then followed Dean as he stormed off, petulant and determined, in the direction of the telescope. It was a generic white and red brick building, a small bricked base of circular circumference topped by the white washed concrete and insular padding of the telescope room, a similarly pale painted domed top cracked open just enough so that the unblinking jet-black eye of the telescope could poke out and squint poorly out into the atmosphere, water stains and rust clinging to the industrial bolts that secured the peculiar hodgepodge of architecture together. 

There was a staircase affixed to the angular lean of the towering structure, black peeling rail and sunken and aged brick steps that led up to the main viewing room of the telescope and bypassed the kid friendly play zone that occupied the lower level. They consciously made the decision to avoid the jammy hands and booger infested jamboree downstairs and instead headed straight for the height and seclusion of the telescope’s inner sanctum, Dean’s knees knocking against Sam’s ass as his brother took his sweet time climbing the steps, kept pausing to take in the outer of the building and hum and ah like it was some Monet he was looking at and not a busted ass telescope tower from the 70s. 

Eventually they made it and as Dean had anticipated, broke up a very frustrated and flushed couple who were necking it in the corner. The couple separated with quick bursts of action to tuck in shirts and do up buttons and then with an awkward exchange of ‘heys’ they were suddenly alone, him, Sam, and the love telescope. 

“So…” Dean echoed into the empty room, swung his hands and narrowly missed clapping them together as he walked gentry like to the view finder of the telescope, looked at the charts and directions posted around it to find specific constellations or stars. 

Sam had shuffled to the edge of the room where a curved expanse of plaque was fixed on spindly wooden legs, carvings of initials and crude words tattooing it’s body but with it’s knowledge still visible despite the layers of grime and stains it had accumulated since it’s conception. Dean felt the sudden urge to sanitise his brother’s hands or at least get him some damn latex gloves with the number of harmful bacteria that had to be swimming around on that thing, felt he could get the Clap just looking at it, but he stuffed his own hands into his jacket pockets and looked away instead, focused on a spit ball laying wanton in the corner and not on his unintelligible need to baby his 6ft 4 moose of a brother. 

“Dude, this place has been open nearly 50 years” Sam marvelled, his voice carrying across the space to nestle comfortably between Dean’s shoulder blades, a comfort and a necessity for him to hear his brother at least every few minutes, a balm to calm his nerves, an ointment to his Sam centric insanity. 

“It was named after the major at the time, William Armistead Gayle and it’s owned by the local university, it’s a real centre of the community, says kids have been coming here and learning about space since the 60s…there’s even a replica of the Hubble Space Telescope here”

Dean hummed at that, tried to imagine ever having stayed in one place long enough to have favourite haunts or a sense of community spirit. They’d never had that, and it seemed so alien to him, pardon the pun, to think of ever having that continuity of tradition. Kids in this town had grown up with generation after generation treading the same paths, having visited the same parks, the same stores, having gone to the same places on field trips. These local kids had lost their virginity’s in the same parking lots and skeevy motels as their parents and even their grandparents and would likely have their own kids follow the same univariant tradition, never branching out, never experiencing anything beyond knowing the neighbour’s names and Christmas carolling in a troupe with matching festively nauseating Christmas jumpers year after year. 

Once upon a time, he’d wanted that, had wanted that security and homeliness, had sobbed brokenly about it in motel bathrooms at five years old as Sammy slept in his carrycot in the other room and Dad snored away his whiskey sodden slumber. He’d had that, had had someone who cut the crusts off his sandwiches and took him to the play park and introduced him to the neighbour’s kids, he’d had that, he’d had a Mom, had had someone who’d begun to instil that want of normalcy and home in him, but she’d left him all too soon: had created a little boy with hope and wonder in his heart who found he had nowhere for that intrepid kindness to go, who had turned that longing into usefulness instead, had turned that urgency to help and belong into filling bullet shells with rock salt and ensuring his Dad didn’t choke on his own tongue as he slept, that he didn’t stink of liquor and bar smoke long enough for Sammy to notice and gurgle a cry. 

He had turned that wishful thinking into hope for his brother, into kisses over scraped knees and gentle mothering hands for the boy who had never experienced a Mom, who had only his big brother to look up to, a lacklustre replacement with none of the luminescence of Mary Winchester, a boy as broken as his father but with none of the knowhow on how to deal with the trauma and bleak darkness of a world he’d only just begun to experience. Dean Winchester had only been on earth barely half a decade when it lost its allure, and so he’d made another world for himself, had instilled all his childhood hopes and dreams and love and devotion, his longing and his spark, into the world he’d formed around his baby brother. Had looked at the world he’d been given and said no, not good enough, and committed himself to another existence. 

The world didn’t need him for anything beyond being a soldier, but Sam needed him in ways that even he couldn’t understand, needed him in ways that could make him whole again, could breathe life into his mottled and broken being, needed him for who he was, and not for who the world needed him to be. 

“You thinking of pitchin’ up here?” Dean joked half-heartedly, touched one of the plastic brochure dispensers on the wall and then grimaced and wiped his palm on his jacket when his touch lifted layer after layer of dust. 

“What? No” Sam huffed, shook his head and smiled like the idea of him settling down was preposterous. 

“No, man…that’s not me, not anymore.” 

Dean looked over at his brother at that, looked at the gentle alignment of his bones, at the way his eyes settled on an illustration of a family pointing and gazing up in wonder at the stars with longing and pity, looked at the way Sam looked sad enough to weep but then covered it with the dismissal and resignation of a Winchester. 

“What _do_ you want then? Mr. Joe-College” 

“I’m not-“ Sam shook his head, dispelled the mention of Stanford that always sat unwanted and sour between them, tucked his hands in his pockets and walked over to press his eye to the viewfinder of the telescope. 

Dean waited, just watched his brother’s chest rise and fall as he explored the cosmos, watched as Sam’s spine, once splintered and frayed, now mended by his brother’s reckless abandon for his own soul, stained pointed and firm against the thin expanse of his tan jacket. 

“I’m not anything. I’m just- a hunter. What I want is Lilith, to finish what we started. That’s what I want. Her head on a plate, bloody. Nothing more, nothing less” 

Sam straightened up, tucked his hair behind his ear and looked sidelong at his brother, looked determined yet also fragilely embarrassed, as though his earnest honesty would be taken badly by Dean. Dean swallowed uncomfortably, choked down his brother’s words with disgruntled and emotive resignation. Sam, his insanely smart, hopeful, kind little brother, Sam, the one chance the Winchester line had of happiness, Sam who was intelligent enough to apply to Stanford and get a full ride, Sammy ‘I have a law school interview on Monday, it’s my whole future on a plate’, now filling that same plate with a demon’s bloodied husk, Sam who had always wanted to be normal now resigned to being a killer of monsters, to seeing the lull of a dead waxen eye roll up to greet him rather than the scripted cursive of a Stanford University diploma. 

Sam who now shoved aside his grotty blood and gut-stained hair instead of moving aside the tassel of a graduation cap, Sam who spent his days riding shotgun with his doomed soulmate, his brother, instead of kissing the sweetness of strawberry dipped champagne off Jess’ lips at their wedding. 

“Right. Uh- nice. Totally…balanced” Dean floundered, deadpanned and looked away, didn’t know what to do with his hands so instead squatted down and pressed himself against the telescope’s eye hole in Sam’s place. 

Ten seconds past and he straightened back up, frowned cluelessly at the floor and then opened and closed his mouth, tried and failed to accumulate words before he finally found the right ones. 

“Dude- did you just see-“

“The parking lot?”

“Yeah”

“Yeah”

“Damn tourist spots” Dean grumbled, kicked the telescope hard as Sam snorted and sighed his humour into the air, unknowingly shunted the telescope back into its usually affixed position looking at the Hunter’s star, at Orien, hidden yet always trained on them wherever he orbited in the sky. 

“Guess this is why people come here to sneak around, must be some sorta known thing amongst locals” Sam suggested, somehow still jovial about the whole escapade where Dean felt cheated and pissed off. 

“Sheila owes me $10” he growled, turned away briskly and stomped down the telescope room’s brick steps, only felt mildly comforted when he saw Baby, rain spotted and sleek, waiting for them in the parking lot. 

“She _did_ try and give you a discount…” Sam reasoned, grinned and dodged when Dean whirled around and glared at him with a very Oscar Wilde flap to his leather jacket. 

“I don’t want to talk about it!” Dean scowled, shoved Sam just to touch him, grinned to himself when he felt his brother’s weight lean into him half-heartedly, and unlocked Baby’s door when they reached her, long strides having taken them across the asphalt in no time at all. 

Sam bit back another laugh and as Dean watched, ducked his head and slid himself into his rightful position at his right-hand side in the Impala, clicked his seatbelt and scuffled around as he took his boots off, tried to get comfortable for what would no doubt he a long drive to wherever they wound up next. 

Dean hesitated for just a moment before the unforgiving gape of distance between him and his brother bore into him with hated intensity and he couldn’t and didn’t want to resist the tug any longer. He swung himself unceremoniously into the driver’s seat, bypassed buckling his seat belt until Sam noticed and bitched at him to secure it, and then turned the key in the ignition to hear Baby purr and rumble, her vibrations soothing his Sam related jitters and ensuring that the sudden flare of itching about his mark, ever hidden now beneath his trusted watch, was drowned out as he slammed the driver’s side door, eased off the brake and teased the gas with the toe of his steel capped boot. 

He didn’t have a destination in mind, hadn’t even planned their little excursion that day, but he liked it that way: no path set, no predetermined appearances, no one expecting them or relying on them beyond the responsibility and duty they laden themselves with. As if on cue, Sam pulled out his stickered and scuffed laptop as they careered off down to the main interstate and opened the case of its lid, waited with fingers tapping unrhythmically on the keyboard as it booted up, did some Wifi hot spot voodoo with a flash drive that Dean could never understand and then sat head bowed, furled knuckles to his lips and brown hair curling at opposite ends of his forehead, temperamental and too goddamn cute for someone Sam’s age. 

Dean knew his brother would bitch at him for playing music whilst he worked, but he also knew his brother well enough to know that Sam wouldn’t stop him playing it: would sit there with the temperance and skill of someone adjusted to working and living with classic rock as the continuous soundtrack to their day-to-day life, put up with it for Dean and because as much as he moaned and complained, he loved that music too: it was part of them, just as they were a part of each other. 

It was only a couple of hours later when Sam pulled up a news article of a man somewhere north of them, around a three-day drive, who had coughed up razorblades onto the well to do premium tile of his suburban home, had apparently been scarfing Halloween candy and had got a mouthful of searing metal alongside the usual caramel and nougat. 

It was a no brainer, and with a mutual nod and shrug of ample agreement, they’d adjusted their route to head onward to Halloween-town. If only they’d known what had been waiting there for them however, they never would’ve agreed to the case so flippantly. 

=

At first they’d thought it was just a witch, had been so damn sure of it they’d almost been cocky in their self-assurance and professionalism. One vic with razor blades imbedded in his throat and another drowned, scalded and gagged bobbing for apples at an underage teenage shindig, both with hex bags at the scene and both with links to each other: had both known the blonde bombshell who’d been skulking around giving Dean a come-hither eye. Blondie was the babysitter of the razor blade vic’s kid and best friend, or hateful acquaintance, to the dead high school cheerleader. That, coupled with a troubled past, recent moving credentials, and a track record for drawing creepy and grotesque artwork, gave them the green light to go after her and put the towns mysterious death’s to bed. 

Sam, big brain that he was, had discovered about Samhain, had spent hours poring over lore until he pieced together the witch’s devious plan: blood sacrifices to bring back the original Mac Daddy of Halloween, the original sinner and devourer of flesh, the original bogeyman with destructive power that slithered free and evil when the veil between life and death was at it’s thinnest on Halloween night. 

Everything happened quickly after that, they were ready to track down Tracy and gank themselves a witch, had all the weapons and arsenal they needed in Baby’s trunk ready to go, but suddenly had a cold trail and an even colder awareness of what this girl was capable of. Tracy was now missing, and if she was ready to raise Samhain, the original baddie of demons, then she had to be pretty dangerous, pretty talented, had to have some serious mojo up her sleeve, some specific and dangerous knowhow to not only be aware of the spell to raise Samhain, but actually carry it out, to murder three people in cruel and calculated ways and then use the residual energy of their deaths to power up some ancient demonic terroriser of townsfolk and children. 

They had just got back to their motel, nothing much else on their minds other than finding Tracy before she managed to score her third and final victim and raise Samhain up from hell, when Dean’s mark began to burn white hot and scornful on his wrist. 

Dean had hissed wildly, turned his back on his brother and tried to undo the strap just enough to wedge his thumbnail beneath the band and scratch the living hell out of it, when he heard the creak of their motel door open behind him and then Sam’s frantic and alarmed shouts, heard the whip draw of a gun and the snick of the safety as it was thrown off. 

“Who are you?!” Sam roared, was tense as a brick wall, mouth gritted shut and spittle flying from his lips as he stared down the intruders in their grotty two bed motel room, didn’t lower his gun or retreat even a step as the first unwelcome guest, a man dressed like an overworked tax account, stepped closer to him. 

Dean didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t goddamn believe it, except he could, that the Angels had found them here, ran into the room and threw himself between the gun and the Angel, created a protective shield around his brother and grabbed Sam roughly by his shoulders, angled him back and away and shoved him until he was behind him, spun round to face the Angel, hated his back open and vulnerable, a target to the higher ups of Heaven, and then looked back over his shoulder at Sam, at his wide eyed, pissed and furious brother, at Sam who goggled at him, mouth jarred with tension and gun lowered only because he was there, because it was Dean, looked at his brother with questions burning in his ignited hazel eyes. 

“STOP! Sam, stop! it’s him, it’s…Castiel, the angel, stop!”

And just like that, Sam let go of the gun, lowered it with a swing dead weighted and sure, let go of it as quickly and smoothly as the fall of the guillotine as it plummeted down upon the wicked and unworthy, unclenched his jaw and allowed the light and glory of belief, of hope and unrestrained relief, bloom upon his features. 

Dean immediately felt sick, couldn’t tear his intense and broken gaze away from his brother, his brother who’d dropped his weapon and opened himself up like a goddamn two dollar hooker as soon as he’d heard the word ‘Angel’, couldn’t believe that Sam, for all his book smarts and reservations, for all that he’d listened to with Dean going on and on about the unreliability and dickishness of Asstiel and his band of merry dickholes, would drop everything and lay himself down grovelling and spread open the first chance he got, would present himself like a bitch in heat to anyone that could reassure him of the notion of purity and good, would give himself over to anyone, absolutely anyone, that wasn’t his brother, would even pick a demon over him, would always be a glutton for religious confirmation. 

Sam stepped forward reverently, his large booted feet snagging on the cheap unpicked motel carpet as he tried to step around his brother and make a bee line for the trench coated Angel, for his death sentence, and Dean couldn’t help but put an arm out to stop him, didn’t even consciously decide to do so, just put out his arm ram rod straight, created a barricade between his brother and the ethereal douchebag, bared his teeth and dug Castiel’s eyes out his sockets with his mind, knew the Angel had to have heard his threatening prayers, knew that Castiel knew that to step even an edge closer would mean the spleen being ripped from his carcass of a meat suit. 

“Hello, Sam” the Angel spoke, earned himself a snarl from Dean who had just noticed the looming presence of another jerk wad Angel by the bathroom, broad shouldered and suited and as he turned, equally distrustful of him as he was of it. 

Putting his long fingered gentle hand on Dean’s arm, Sam squeezed his bicep tightly, whether in comfort or in exhilarated anticipation at the Angel having spoken, Dean didn’t know, and sidestepped his brother, dodged Dean when he immediately tried to grab Sam’s jacket and pull him back and walked, back hunched and head bowed in submission, in awed delight, strode forward and put his hand out confidently for a handshake, eyebrows raised and a demure polite smile tugging at his lips, trying to impress whilst not knowing that he could never hope to impress those who were dead set on murdering him. 

“Oh my God” Sam breathed out a smile, bit back his tongue and then floundered, wondered if he’d met an Angel and immediately blasphemed and desperately tried to backtrack. 

“Er-uh, I didn’t mean to, sorry. It’s an honor, really, I-I’ve heard a lot about you” 

Dean watched as Castiel took this in with the uncomprehensive tact of a toddler, tilted his head and allowed his vessel’s eyes to drop down to the proffered handshake, made no move to take it as he took in Sam’s thinly veiled enthusiasm and his drive to impress. 

This was Dean’s worst nightmare come to fruition, Sam giddy and dew eyed meeting the Angels that were fated to extinguish his life, his baby brother all but bouncing on the soles of his feet and flapping a flustered swooning hand as he lined up to make a fool out of himself, to bare himself mind body and soul only to be skewered with barbs of disappointed mockery and disdain and tossed aside like every other idiot who thought that praying to some invisible robed man and his morally questionable lackeys was a good idea. 

Castiel hadn’t taken his brother’s hand still and despite himself, despite the way he really didn’t want anyone touching his brother, least of all an Angel, he felt pissed: felt scorn and aggravation rising up in him because who dared ignore Sam like that? The kid had literal puppy eyes for Pete’s sake, come on! He would’ve said something but as it was, his brother had got there first. Sam had begun to frown in confusion and he now shook his hand, waved his fingers in a rippled wiggle, and Castiel’s slanted and goggled expression suddenly morphed into miniscule understanding. 

The Angel leant forward and clasped Sam’s hand in his own, held it sandwiched and secure like he was meeting an old friend. Sam let out an audible breath of relief and Dean had to press the soles of his feet hard into the soles of his shoes lest he leap forward and rip his naïve adoring brother away. 

“And I, you, Sam Winchester…” 

Sam’s face brightened so exponentially that Dean winced, had to look away from the way his brother’s face became so luminous with hope and duty, with knowing what he thought he knew, had to squint his eyes as his brother’s chest puffed out with newfound purpose and glory. 

It was short lived. 

“…the boy with the demon blood” 

Dean closed his eyes momentarily, felt like he was the one swallowing razor blades when he opened his eyes again to see Sam’s kind, generous light, fade to a sad and startled glow and then a miniscule pinprick, saw his brother’s need to be recognised in the fight against evil by a God knowing being flicker, morse code stammers of S.O.S, before it winked out to nothing, saw as Castiel’s words left Sam in the dark again, left him bereft and starkly human, left him broken and scrambling, no more special and no more gracious and good than anyone else. 

“Glad to see you’ve ceased your extracurricular activities” Castiel continued, oblivious to how he’d just shattered Dean’s brother, retracted his hand and wiped it palm down on one of the oversized pockets of his stupid accountant’s trench coat.

Dean wanted to take that hand and wedge it where the sun don’t shine, would’ve done more than that, had his knife stuffed in his boot just the right sharpness to filet him an Angel, but the other body in the room, a stern looking serious foil to Castiel’s meagre blue eyed stubble and tax forms, made himself known. 

“Let’s keep it that way” the Angel spoke, kept his back to them like he was goddamn Strider hiding in the shadows.

“Yeah, okay, chuckles” Dean snapped, on edge and wary and not all trusting of this new intruder. 

Sam stepped away from Castiel after that, held himself strong but Dean could see how he hunched his shoulders round his ears, how he narrowed himself inward like he’d received a bruising blow to the chest. Sam had always been so eager to please, first with John, and then when he’d discovered he could never win there, with Dean: had always tried to one up himself, prove he knew his alphabet, prove he could recite Latin incantations word for word, prove he could shoot with a steady arm and join him and Dad on hunts, prove he shouldn’t be left behind, that he wasn’t a liability, that he was special, useful, worthy of being included. 

Religion had been Sam’s safest haven, had been the place where for once in his life he couldn’t get hurt, where he could lay himself bare and be accepted for who he was, where he could be the boy with dreams of college and leaving the family business, could be the boy with psychic premonitions, where he could even be the boy with demon blood coursing cursed and putrid through his vines and still find reason for hope, could highlight passages thousands upon thousands of years old and find redemption and peace amongst soft semi-transparent paper and cursive script. 

What Sam had never worked out was that he was already worthy, was already good and just, was already more morally sound and empathetic than any Angel could ever be. If the predictive nature of his mark was correct, and judging by the insincere douchebags he’d met so far proclaiming to be winged messengers of God, then Dean felt very secure saying that Sam, human, kind, gentle, determined, forgiving and perspective shifting Sam, was better than the lot of them. 

It wasn’t even a contest: the Angels were spectral balls of light with no more ability to emote than a spoon, and Sam? Sam had a whole arsenal of emotions, could hook line and sinker any feeling or prospective inkling of one with an offhand smile and a long lashed puppy dog eyed glance, could get you feeling vulnerable and needy just by being in his presence, just by breathing in the same air as him, could compel you to slit your throat if need be, although Sam never would, would always be the one throwing away the jagged knife and convincing you that life was worth living, that even if it was hard, you should always keep fighting. 

But Sam would never see it that way, didn’t even tell Dean but he knew that his little brother felt unworthy of such praise, would always shrug off kind comments by victims they’d saved or deflect their adoration onto Dean, would duck his head and huff a laugh, would flash a strained smile and make some bullshit excuse to pardon himself. How he didn’t see it wasn’t beyond Dean, knew that they’d been raised in an environment where you had to take ‘good job’ and ‘nice shot’ as uplifting and confidence boosting rather than the empty lacklustre throw away comments they actually were. 

They’d been raised with scraps of emotion, had grown up looking to each other for validation and hope, and somewhere along the line Sam had sucked out all of Dean’s miniscule ability to comfort and empathise and had used that power to morph into a man who was quick to look after and reassure others, but had little to no capability to do the same for himself. 

The only person Dean had ever been able to be there for was his brother, didn’t count feeding his Dad’s alcoholism as a win in that department, and therefore anything else he did was just a rehashing of that praise, just a reworking of the same tricks he knew how to use on Sam, and if they didn’t work? Hell, he was out of ideas, had no inkling how what to do. That was usually when his brother would step in anyway, would huff and scowl at his elbow and interject an apology and a carefully chosen and well-placed balm to whatever horror the victim had been through, would listen to their woes with softly dipped eyebrows and wide all-seeing hazel eyes, would let them feed off his strength and need to prove how virtuous and worthy he was, didn’t even know who he was trying to convince, but somehow felt that he had to. 

As Dean protectively stood Infront of his brother, put an insecure hand out to brush against Sam’s wrist and felt the twitch of Sam’s tendons in recognition of the touch, Castiel told them once again about the seals, told them how the witch trying to raise spooky mother Samhain was one of them, that if she succeeded the seal would break, and that they would be one step closer to the apocalypse and the rising of Lucifer. 

Sam seemed to have recovered his tongue by that point and had gushed, still so goddamn eager and determined, that they knew where the witch was, that they knew who she was and that they could get to her before she completed her sacrifices and fulfilled the ritual, that if the Angels trusted them then the seal would remain unbroken and they would ensure satisfaction for all those involved, that they could be relied upon to enact this Godly mission that Dean wanted no goddamn part in. 

Uriel, as he had been introduced, the shady heavy browed Angel skulking in the darkness, had spoken up then, had stepped forward with purpose and self-imposed greatness and had told them in no unclear terms that there was no need, that they were to evacuate the town, for it was to be destroyed, blown up, a thousand two hundred and fourteen people murdered in Angelic mercy for the good of humanity, murdered because those whom they prayed to for mercy deemed them as canon fodder in the fight against the fallen. 

Dean felt the moment Sam’s faith truly broke, the moment his last vestiges of compassion and determined belief waned and choked out their dying breath, felt his brother’s shuddered gasp as it reverberated in the air around them and his brother’s sure-footed stance had him stumble ever so slightly, felt the press of Sam’s panicked heated body leant against him, felt as it spiralled and clung to him for purchase as his world view shifted and scrambled to realign itself. 

Angels were ready to murder innocents and Sam suddenly didn’t know why he’d been so diligently praying all those years. 

“No, you can’t do this, you’re Angels! I mean, aren’t you supposed to- you’re supposed to show mercy!” Sam insisted, looked from one impassive Angelic face to the next, implored them to see reason with the doe eyed sincerity of a man so bound up in belief and activism that he failed to see the utilitarianism of the beings before him. 

“Says who?” asked Uriel, almost mocking in his jovial dismissal of his brother’s pain.

“We have no choice” piped up Castiel, nodded his agreement with his emotionless lacky and squinted righteously at Dean. 

Dean wished he could create a physical Angel proof barrier so he didn’t have to feel that heavy probing gaze, felt dirty and violated the longer he stood there, grit his teeth and dug his heels in to the earth beneath him, an earth that these Angels were well prepared to destroy. 

“Of course you have a choice!” Dean argued, voice a deep unquestioned baritone. 

“I mean, come on, what? You’ve never questioned a crap order, huh? What are you both, just a couple of hammers?” 

“Look, even if you can’t understand it, have faith. The plan is just” Castiel spoke calmly, spoke as though the unerring word of God was a reason to listen. 

Sam ogled at Castiel at that, looked fleetingly at Dean with his mouth hung open, his ears red from all the blaspheming he was hearing from the very mouths of those who were meant to draw upon sinners to repent for such immoral and callous words. 

“How can you even say that?” Sam pushed, asked with incredulous resignation, his face drawn in saddened grief for those not marked to die by an Angel’s hand, knew not that he was among those chosen few, just with his execution scheduled for a later date. 

“Because it comes from Heaven, that makes it just” Castiel responded simply, looked at Sam with the expression of one trying to decipher a puzzle so encoded it was near impossible. 

“Oh, it must be nice, to be _so_ sure of yourselves” Dean said curtly, tried to subdue the repulsed wince that overtook his body when Castiel turned his stark blue eyes on him instead. 

“Tell me something, Dean, when your father gave you an order, didn’t you obey?” 

Dean said nothing, met the Angels piercing gaze with disdaining hatred, scoffed a huff of dismissal but felt his heart clench uncomfortably in his chest, felt his mouth twitching in caught out acknowledgment as Castiel stood his ground, kept his hands firmly on the lance he’d just embedded deep into Dean’s chest cavity, all but grinned with the smugness that radiated from his being right. 

Defensively, Dean pulled his watch strap tighter against his mark, felt the acidic burn of it as it screamed at him with renewed vigour at Castiel’s words. Yes, his father had given him an order, had given him an order to not let Sam know what he was the doomed other half of his soul, to strap bandages and watches and shirt sleeves around his wrist and never let the mark be seen, never let it touch the freeing ease of clean unstifled air, never let his sickness and immorality be known, never let his baby brother know that what had started as overbearing sibling loyalty and caring, had morphed into something far dirtier, far more disturbed and removed from familial love. 

Never let your brother know what you fantasised about in the dark, never let Sam know that you’ll be the reason he ends up dead, that he’s only near Angels because you brought him back into the life, because you tore him away from a girl and a job and a front yard, because you couldn’t live without him and now he was clueless and full of zest for a life he would never live as he waited in line for the guillotine. 

The Angels only knew about Sam because of Dean, because he’d been unable to live a day or even a minute more without his baby brother. Perhaps if he’d not sold his soul, if he’d been anybody else, if they’d never even got to that point, Sam would’ve had a shot at escaping the prophesized mark. Perhaps if Dean had never decided to go into Sam’s dorm that dark and lonely night, had just continued standing rain pocked and shaking outside in the parking lot, Baby ticking coolly behind him and his gaze firmly rooted on where he could see Sam getting ready for bed, civilian and soft, behind the window panes, if he had been a lot more brave and lot less selfish, none of this would have been happening. 

Back in the present, Sam glanced confused and calculating at him, seemed to figure out something from the tenseness of his jaw and the immobile rigidness of his frame that satisfied him with incorrect knowledge before he looked away once more, turned his fire licked and furious gaze on the Angels before him instead. 

“Well sorry boys, looks like the plans have changed” Dean spoke finally, challenged the Angels to dare question him, to look him in the eye and tell them they were gonna blow the town to smithereens and endanger their prime chess piece in the process. 

They wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, and Dean saw all that in the tense shift of legs and the crackle of uncommunicated frustration that rippled between the two Angels, saw the way they bolstered themselves to hold off his attack yet still held their supercharged fury and wrath back, didn’t make a move toward either him or Sam, knew they had higher orders and didn’t want to mess with the master plan. 

“You think you can stop us?” Uriel scoffed, raised his eyes and crossed his arms objectionably over his broad suited chest, defensive and cruel. 

“No” Dean admitted, pouted his lips and smacked them as he shrugged, set his brow low as he levelled with Uriel, glanced at Castiel’s prone form and grit his teeth. 

“But you need me, you didn’t drag me outta hell for nothing, no you see, I know you have some grand master plan, got me lined up chompin’ at the bit to go after your ol’ buddy Lucifer, so no, we can’t stop you, but you’re gonna let us handle it, otherwise you’re gonna have to blow up this town with us in it.”

Uriel snorted, pocketed his hands and swaggered forward to stand domineering and dark next to Castiel.

“What makes you think we would spare your brother? If we only need you?”

Dean’s salvia dried up in his mouth, immediately felt his fingers twitch toward his wrist, felt the throb of his mark and caught Sam’s knife’s edge of a gaze cutting a line across his tendons, noted Sam taking stock of the way he shifted and moved, always conscious, always hyper aware of every miniscule gesture, was used to tracking him and understanding him, was trained to read Dean’s mannerisms and be able to instinctively know his next move, a tool for hunting and an even better weapon when teasing unwanted emotions out of his brother’s stubborn and hardened shell. 

“You won’t hurt, Sam” he said, tried to found sure and unaffected but knew his heart rampaging in his chest told another story. 

“You won’t hurt, Sam, because you know that if he goes? If you lay one finger on his head? I’ll kill you. I will kill you ALL, and I won’t do a single goddamn thing you ask. Hell, I’ll even take myself out, send myself right back down to the pit. Don’t think you’ll be able to swing a second rescue, do you?”

Castiel glanced at Uriel, slow, methodical, a turtle peeking out of its shell to assess the danger before making it’s deciding steps across the rough terrain of the road ahead. Uriel pursed his lips tightly, chuckled a deep, menacing grumble of humour and raised a hand up, pressed his thumb and forefinger together as if to snap them, obviously expected it to be menacing with the way his face distorted and twisted into murderous and sickening malice.

“Oh, really?”

he asked, dark flint of his eyes landing on Sam’s unprotected and prone form.

“Stop”

All three of them turned to look at Castiel, Sam breathing hard and heavy, a pissed and shaking hand clasped on Dean’s jacket, furious at him for threatening to leave him but not in the space to talk, Dean weak kneed and barely able to believe he’d nearly completed the goddamn soul mark’s prophecy by shooting the shit, and Uriel, fuming and impatient, a butchers scowl stealing his features as the promise of the hunt suddenly evaporated. 

“You must not hurt, Sam Winchester” Castiel intoned, looked at Uriel with undecipherable traction. 

“It is not the plan.” 

“Castiel, I do not have time for negligence- he is a verminous stain. He needs to be taken out.” 

Dean silently shoved Sam behind him once more, hadn’t even noticed that Sam had stepped forward, stupid, selfless little brother, found himself twisted with his hip half toward his brother and half toward the Angels when Sam refused to let go of his viced grip on his jacket, held him close and dear with a white knuckled hold that betrayed his true fear and insecurity. 

“No” Castiel said again, shook his head, stared steady and unmoved at Uriel until the taller Angel slowly lowered and unclasped his fingers, let them fall, geared and ready yet unused, to his side. 

“He will not be harmed”

“OK, great” Dean ventured, felt Sam’s fingers twitch against his chest where he gripped his jacket, cautious, a warning to step carefully, to not kick this gift horse in the mouth. 

Dean had been trying to keep Sam safe from Angels his whole life, he wasn’t about to become negligent now. 

“So…we’re good? You leave the town intact; we stop Samhain rising and taking bites out of people’s pumpkin lovin’ asses and then…Yahtzee? Everyone wins.” 

“Not so fast” Uriel said, lip curled as he reined in his malodorous intent and bit back the no doubt flavourful words he wanted to hurl at the Winchesters. 

“You don’t get off that easy. We won’t kill your brother, but we will still destroy this town.” 

“You can’t do that!” Sam said, finally broke through into the conversation, sick of listening and being threatened, tired of watching as the haloed heroes he’d prayed to become less and less favourable with every word they uttered. 

“We can fix this! We know how to, just let us go and we can end this!” 

“Sam-“ Dean began, but paused suddenly when Castiel raised a palm, flinched back as his body fearfully reacted ahead of his mind. 

“Go” 

“What?” Uriel spat, horrified, his sentiment echoed by both Sam and Dean, eyes blown wide and mouths dropped open in muted disbelief. 

“Go. Kill the witch. I suggest you leave quickly.” 

As Uriel turned on his counterpart and began to argue what seemed to be their dismissal and opportune chance to escape, Dean pulled Sam out of that room as fast as he could, hurled his brother out the door with reckless abandon, threw Sam so aggressively that he banged his elbows on every which surface available before they tumbled out onto the grey paved sidewalk that skirted the motel parking lot. 

Sam had the foresight to slam the door closed behind them, lunged back for the doorknob in a move that had him fighting Dean’s forearm as it instinctively went to restrain him, managed it by the skin of his teeth, closed it just in time to see an LED level light flare sear through the paper thin curtains of their room, a solar level surge that had Dean wildly blinking and shaking his head to rid the horrid black spots from his vision, a mini eclipse that skidded unwanted across his retinas, the black smudge of Sam’s silhouette now imprinted visually upon everything in his eyeline, a outside presence now instead of just the one welded onto his innards and soul. 

“They’re gone” Sam said, peered inside the pitch emptiness of their room, breathed hard and shell shocked as the reality of their conversed agreement came to him in stops and starts. 

“Good riddance” Dean exhaled raggedly, put his palm over his galloping heart and groaned in refreshed aggravation when he turned to see his beloved Baby egged, scrambled yellow and white by some kid in a space suit who’d begged candy off them earlier only to be scorned and shooed away. 

“ASTRONAUT!” Dean roared, spun around theatrically as if he could catch the rapscallion like a villain in a scooby doo episode, spittle flying from his mouth that he then awkwardly wiped away when some lady with a paper bag of store-bought groceries lurched in horror crossing the parking lot to her room. 

”Astronaut…” Dean repeated lower, groused quietly to himself and cursed as he creaked open the Impala’s yolk splatted door and slid into the driver’s seat, flicked a piece of stray runaway egg from his shoulder and grimaced in disgust, slammed baby’s door too hard in anger and then rushed to run his hands over her metal and hinges, hushed her tenderly and apologised for his brashness. 

When he rose up in his seat, he found Sam settled in the passenger seat next to him, his face purposely wiped blank and his lips twisted taut and tense, his jaw ticking and his visible dimple flashing in and out as he chewed a worried sore into his cheek. 

“What?” Dean asked, leaned back and watched his brother closely, took in the stoop of Sam’s neck and the guarded mask he was so desperately trying to keep in place. 

“Nothing”

Dean raised an eyebrow and Sam exhaled loudly, huffed a throw away sigh and raised his hands searchingly in front of himself, let them fall just as quickly back into his lap, defeated and lacklustre in their search for meaning. 

“I thought they’d be different. I mean- I thought they’d be _righteous_.”

He watched as his brother warred with the reality of their situation, as he assembled in his mind all that Dean had warned him and told him his entire life compared with the douchey military grade church rejects that he’d just met in their scummy run-down motel room. He was sure Sam’s imagined meeting with Castiel hadn’t included the trenchcoated asshole greeting him as the boy with the demon blood, hadn’t involved Sam’s believing and obedient heart being ripped maliciously out his chest to lay scarred and leaking on the carpet at his feet, had probably been full of moral reassurances and calls to duty in Sam’s play by play in his mind, had now left him bereft and bankrupt with the knowledge that none of that had come to pass, and likely never would. 

“Well…” Dean began tentatively, felt his shoulders round and his hackles rise when Sam looked at him with that old age need for his big brother to make it better, to tell him it would be okay, to find a way out of the impossible hole they had found themselves in and lead him back to the light, to enable him to be positive and free once more. 

“They _are_ righteous, I mean, that’s kinda the problem. Of course there’s nothing more dangerous than some A-hole who thinks he’s on a holy mission”

Sam hummed in mild agreement, picked at his hands and worried the side of his thumb where the nail had begun to split, tugged at it until the fissure in his flesh tore and bled crimson onto the toughened mass of his cuticle. 

Dean immediately put his hand over his brother’s, smothered the bleed with his own palm and denied the evidence of Sam’s life seeping out of him in any way shape or form, couldn’t bare to think of it with Uriel, a bonified Angel of the lord, an authorised contender to take Sam’s life, having threatened to take that very essence just minutes earlier. 

“But, I mean, this is this God? And Heaven? This is what I’ve been praying to?” Sam questioned, looked down at their conjoined hands and let his eyes rest fleetingly on the bulk of Dean’s watch where it was trapped beneath his jacket sleeve. 

Dean didn’t have an answer to that, not one he wanted to give anyway, knew what the right combination of syllables were to comfort his baby brother but didn’t want to give them: wanted to be selfish and smother them, squirrel them away inside a bottle and float it out to sea, wanted to swallow down the remnants of whatever reaffirming language he knew he could use to infuse Sam’s life long belief and inevitably reinstate the old age danger of losing his brother at the hand of the Angelic Gestapo that seemingly ruled the roost up there in Heaven. 

Oh he knew what to say alright, wasn’t born yesterday and knew better than anyone how to plead faith and love back into his brother’s heart, had done it enough times when placating Sam to keep the peace with their father, to convince him that John hadn’t meant what he said, that please could he keep quiet, knew how to guilt his brother and manipulate and sandwich him between two choices, knew how to make Sam think he’d come round to those options himself but really it had been him all along, knew how to play Sammy like a fiddle, didn’t even need the sheet music, could do it blindfolded, asleep or in the grave. 

But he found, as he looked at Sam now, he didn’t want to: he didn’t want to take away his brother’s hope and light, didn’t want to play into the harsh cold tempered cruelty that had been the love John Winchester had shown to his boys. He didn’t want to be the reason that Sam looked at the world, shrugged his sorry shoulders and said ‘yeah, all crap’ and carried on. No, he wanted, hell, needed, Sam to remain an optimist, to keep faith and diligence and belief as the Ace up his sleeve, needed his brother to remain stoically immovable in his view of human goodness and decency lest he become another version of Dean, broken, faithless, alone and unlovable for all the ways in which he had rejected the world that had tried to swallow him whole. 

He was selfish, he knew that, had to be to be contemplating putting Sam’s happiness above his safety, to be considering comforting his brother and ensuring his continued belief in the thing that would one day kill him, would snatch him cold and bloodless from Dean’s grieving hollowed arms. But the thought of Sam, a husk of his former self, a man as resigned and joyless as John Winchester, a man with nothing to alleviate his sense of purpose and give him hope and peace when he closed his eyes at night, a man whom had had so much faith and belief in the duality of the world, had believed that with so much evil there had to be a counterbalance, that there had to be purity and selfless good and unmalicious intent, that there had to be a reason why they did the job they did, that they really were doing God’s work on Earth, would lose all of that enlightened prowess.

And so it was, that even as his mark throbbed low and discomforting on his wrist and the threat of Sam’s mortality soured his bones, he resolved to make the effort to comfort his little brother, to seek out the part of Sam that needed to believe in a higher power, that needed to indulge itself in a pinnacle of just and equitable worship, and give it a well needed boost of moral. 

“Look, man…” Dean began, took back his hand from Sam’s bloodied one and looked down to find the red stain of Sam’s blood pressed into the whorls of his murderer’s fingerprints, a burglar of morality without the decency to cover up his dirty work. 

“I know you’re into the whole God thing, you know, Jesus on a tortilla and stuff like that. But just because there’s a couple of bad apples…doesn’t mean the whole barrel’s rotten. I mean, for all we know, God hates these jerks”

Sam watched him silently, took in his words with drooped eyebrows and sad misbegotten temperance, looked unsure whether he was going to be ridiculed or engaged in rapport, wasn’t quite decided which one he’d prefer to be on the receiving end of. 

“Don’t give up on this stuff, is all I’m saying. Babe Ruth was a dick but baseball’s still a beautiful game.”

I’m giving you a chance, Sammy, I’m giving you what you want, can’t you see? I’m gonna get you killed but I can’t do this, can’t take away what makes you you, can’t take away your belief, can’t tarnish the part of you that makes you lower to your knees and clasp your palms together to pray for a better tomorrow, to send love and recovery and good will to all those you have known, can’t let you go forward into this world looking skyward only to see the changeable nature of weather formations, can’t have you looking up only to see man-made satellites and air pollution and not a gateway to holy and immeasurable sanctuary, of a chance at redemption and immortal happiness, at a chance of something worth living for through the grime and disease and dirt that humans clawed their way through every day. 

Sam didn’t smile, only nodded meekly, looked like he had when Dean had told him Santa wasn’t real and then had tried to bluff and cover up his blatant disregard for his kid brother’s feelings, hung his head low, chin to his chest and fiddled with one of the hex bags they’d found at the teenage dunkin’ party, looked inside the poultice and pretended to be find interest in the charred bone and shrivelled flowers the coarse and mottled fabric held. 

“Sam” Dean tried again, wished he hadn’t said anything when his brother reluctantly raised his bleary hazel eyes to meet his own startled green. 

“Don’t give up” he said, heard the tremor of his own belief in his brother bleed through, knew he wasn’t asking Sam, but was telling him, was begging him in his own tactless and emotionless way. 

If Sam believing in Angels was the root of his faith, then Dean’s belief in his brother was his. 

Sam studied him closely, took in the sincerity of his words coupled with the tension of his jaw, the dampness of his eyes and the starkness of the fear that still lingered, that prickled and pulled at his mark and left him unable to fully affix his usual Dean Winchester mask of displaced cockiness and ease. 

Whatever his brother saw there, it must’ve done something, because slowly, minutely, Sam smiled. It was a tremor of a thing, a barely there phenomenon, but the sight of it melted Dean’s defences within a millisecond, caused the iron clad grip of terror and guilt around his heart to ease its tortuous dismantlement of his inner organs. 

The smile was shy and melancholy in nature and yet oh so beautiful, could have launched a thousand ships and birthed a thousand doves with the it’s demure gentile demeanour. Sam’s dimples, always ready to make an appearance, dipped into his cheeks, inverted inward with the sighed contentment of a nesting mother bird settling in to her bed of twigs and down feathers. 

“Alright” said Dean, disarmed by Sam’s brightness, slapped his hands down upon his thighs and smeared Sam’s bloodied transfer of fluids on the denim. 

“Let’s go kill a witch”

Sam huffed a laugh at that, increased the press of his dimples tenfold against the hollows of his cheeks, but didn’t protest: just allowed Dean to escape from their emotionally charged conversation, allowed him an out to not explore his feelings, to not share and care, and sat quiet and complacent in his place at Dean’s side as they sped out the motel parking lot, thoughts of Angels and deals swallowed up by exhaust smoke and miles gunned beneath Baby’s gas pedal. 

It hadn’t been as easy as they’d thought when it had all gone down, had involved zombies and bloodied masks that seeped sceptic and sharp with the tang of iron into their pores, had meant the witch being killed by her ancient disloyal boyfriend and the actual rising of Samhain, despite all their best efforts to stop it. 

And for all of Dean’s own best efforts and intent, Sam, his mercurial pain in the ass brother, had used his powers again, had put himself right back into the danger zone, had seen the rubber armbands and safety cord of the shallow zone, had seen the components that Dean had put in place to keep him safe, and had thrown any regard for them out the window, had stormed right past them and written his own script, paved his own path and thrown any and all caution to the wind. 

They were now no closer than they had been before to stopping Lucifer, had broken another seal and had likewise broken Sam’s otherwise exemplary track record for using his demonic psychic voodoo powers. And to top it all off, as if it wasn’t enough to have Dean floundering and clueless in the face of his brother’s inability to commit to non-Supernatural aided hunting, he had Castiel lapping at his heels, spouting about some morality crisis of his own, admitting that he doubted the heavenly orders that were being passed down to him, that he would rather put his faith in Dean than in his creator. 

Dean didn’t want Castiel’s faith: all he wanted was his brother, safe, uncorrupted and free from Angelic persecution. 

The only person whose faith he’d ever needed was Sam’s. He didn’t need some Angel making him into a pariah, hoisting him up onto a golden monument to call forth the downtrodden and the confused, to make him the face of an Angelic revolt. 

No, Dean had no space in his cluttered and morbid life for Angels appealing to his humanity, had nothing left to give that wasn’t already given wholly to Sam. All that mattered now was keeping Sam on the straight and narrow, ensuring his safety and making sure that the Angels didn’t use his temporary lapse in judgement as a red card warranted excuse for elimination. 

What he didn’t know though, was that a different breed of Angel was right round the corner, one who would, just for a moment, cause him to loosen his strict Sam-centric morality, who would see through him and his intense barbaric love for his brother, who would take his bruised and fractured soul in her palms and breathe into him the love and reassurance he needed to keep on fighting, to keep his brother out of persecutions path. Who would give him the courage to ensure Sam needn’t get any closer to finding out the truth about the mark, wouldn’t know what Dean hid from him in the dark or find out about the twisted vestiges of his mind that for all their Sam-centric focus, had played a major part in his Hell-time torment. 

And little did he know that just as he would find safe haven in an Angel’s fickle wings, Sam had an agenda of his own, and it didn’t include Heaven’s greatest, no, it was much more of the Southern persuasion, because Sammy, oh Sammy, he was beyond tired of waiting for Dean to spill the beans on his time in the hell-fire continent, had a bone deep ache of a feeling that there was more to the story than Dean had divulged, a feeling that would only be ratified and granted free reign when Alistair, head torturer and devourer of hope, raised his ugly distorted head and told a story of his brother, of a butcher’s knife for a smile and Sam’s name dripping like Arsenic from the bloodied pulp of his sinner’s lips.

Sam wanted to know it all, and he wanted to know it now, was too much Dean’s brother, a man forged in the image of his other half, to allow incomplete and hidden knowledge to run rampant, was too damn stubborn and desperate to ensure his brother’s livelihood, to leave well enough alone, would always want to find out the truth, would fight tooth and nail to ensure he knew everything about his brother and would commit himself willingly to the hunt even if knowing what he shouldn’t would only bring him unhappiness and strife, even if knowing the truth could very well be the thing that got him killed. 

Sam finally wanted to know about what his brother hid from him in the shadows, and Dean’s mark pre-emptively began to scream.


	4. Angel on my shoulder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean meets Anna, a girl hunted by Hell and revered by Heaven, and sees in her all that he had lost and longed for in Sam.  
> We also get an insight into Sam's mind, into his time with Ruby, and what it cost him to lose his brother.

**November, 2008**

For all his faith in his baby brother, for all his tenacious belief that Sam was pure as pure could be, for all his determination to convince himself that his brother’s demonic infused choices were grounded in misplaced morality, to believe that he had been led astray and manipulated, Dean really as an idiot. He still had faith, didn’t know how to shake the sincere absolutism that he had on the subject of his brother’s goodness, had so much conviction in his weary bones, in his heart, that his Sam, his Sammy, was good. 

Had unwavering faithful justification that Sam would always be the snot nosed little kid who’d begged their Dad to rescue stray kittens when they’d found them abandoned, entangled and mewing, by the side of the road. That Sam was still the same bright eyed analytical do-gooder who always infused philosophy and ethics into every aspect of his existence, into every decision he made and every dew eyed forgiving glance he shot Dean, who forgave him for everything he’d ever done, not because he deserved it, but because it was who Sam was, because he thought it un-just to not allow others the benefit of the doubt.

Dean knew that that sunny side up optimism of his brother’s had waned slightly, had been filtered and strained and re-constituted by experience, grief, loss and the many arguments he and his brother had had where they’d ripped into each other with loveless abandon. Had bitten and torn at the other’s flesh, maimed each other’s resilience and limped away to lick their wounds, only to find their own ill-fitting saliva was unable to return life to busted sinew and bruised muscle, and had turned right back around to stumble, wanton and dependant, back into each other’s arms.

Sam had smoked Samhain, the great big bad of Halloween week, had sent him spiralling in a mass of black smoke right out of some lackadaisical art teacher, and Dean had been there to witness it, had seen his brother as he’d clamped his wide spaced palm upon his forehead, had gripped it so tight his knuckles whitened with the strain. Had seen him as he had ground his teeth together so hard, they flaked bone, had seen as Sam had wet his lips and swallowed down the steady red-black drip of blood that had gushed from his nose, a burst blood vessel or perhaps the expungement of Sam’s sins rushing to flee from his demon addled mind. 

Sam wasn’t apologetic, didn’t even perceive it worth a footnote, didn’t seem to care that he’d broken Dean’s trust again, had gone against his direct wishes, again, and not only his, but those of the Angels, had known he was stepping on thin splintering ice and had strapped on his hobnail boots and done an Irish jig on it’s weakened and expendable surface, had practically tattooed ‘liability’ across his chest in permanent bold lettering.

Now they were cruising, or brooding, whatever you wanted to call it, Dean driving with the gas pedal kissing the floor, Baby thundering her knowing rumble beneath their thighs, and Sam, dancing with the devil, Sam, typing away on his dimly lit laptop with a recurrent ridge over his deep-set eyes, using the flash of streetlights and whatever meagre grain of battery life the device had left to research their next case. Had sunk below it and emersed himself in faux ignorance as Dean drove them through the night, ignored Sam’s three requests to take a piss, and didn’t stop until he saw the spire of a church signifying their return to civilisation.

Saw Sam’s eyes move away from his screen and toward the religious relic with revered acknowledgement, heard more than felt the tense sigh as it left his brother’s tightly clamped teeth, felt righteous indignation that Sam should feel negatively toward the Angels now and not before, when Dean had spent his entire young life training him and begging him to condemn them the same way their father did the yellow-eyed demon. 

It had been well past cordially approved visiting hours when they finally rolled into the parking lot of their next stay-cation catered home for the week, had rumbled to a slumbering halt outside the motel’s office and sat in accusatory and grousing silence as Baby ticked to coolness around them. Sam typed away at his laptop with perfunctory stubbornness as they sat there, rattled the keys with his quick fingered thoughts and seamless use of Google and Ask Jeeves and drove Dean near berserk with his incessant tapping, set his teeth on edge and hitched himself right up to the number one spot for an ass-whooping. 

It was only the battery dying in the insipid piece of technology that had saved both its and Sam’s lives, the only thing that had stopped Dean from launching both of them out the windscreen to crash careening and confused onto the front desk, announcing themselves with splintered wood and busted nails rather than the jingle of a tuneless and rusted gold bell as old as time itself. Dean would never hurt his car though, another chink in his armoured denouncement of Sam’s use of technology to avoid him, and so it was that when Sam closed the lid of his now darkened laptop, its fan whirring helplessly from overuse and age, Dean swung his legs out onto the rain slicked concrete of the parking lot and went off to find the no doubt pissed and grumbling Receptionist who would greet them and get them a room.

He was half tempted to book a single, but he was in no mood to deal with Sam’s grievances and bitching, decided to play nice even if it would have been funny to see the gormless and disoriented nature of his brother’s confusion as he tried to rationalise his freakishly tall frame slotting into the physical barriers of the sofa and its sunken malformed cushions. 

He didn’t know why he’d convinced himself that Sam was suddenly going to change tact and listen to him, didn’t know why he’d lulled himself into a false sense of security, had patted himself on the back and congratulated himself on a job well done when he knew that Sam still had that demon bitch Ruby on speed dial, still checked in with her and whispered ‘need to know’ conversations into the tinny speaker of his old model Blackberry, conversations that Dean was desperate to be a part of, but that Sam consciously kept him out of. 

His brother had begged him to use his powers, and when he’d said no a time too many, well, it was absolutely in Sam’s imprudent nature to throw rationality to the wind when someone could well be saved, when he could be the hero and he could put others before his own safety and well-being. It was as if Sam got a kick out of it, as if he got off on being a martyr, got a rush from willingly stringing himself up to the gallows and tightening the blood stained and greasy noose around his own lenient throat. 

So no, maybe he wasn’t surprised, not really, but he was still pissed, still felt betrayed for the dozenth time, still felt sore and uneasy when he looked at his brother, when Sam looked back at him open and yet shuttered behind the eyes, letting him see what he allowed him to and not all that Dean needed to to feel secure in his own skin. Sam who still didn’t see an issue with his own dalliances with Hell spawn, but who suddenly had a great and growing interest in Dean’s own experiences in the pit. 

He didn’t know what had transpired when he had left Sam alone in their motel room to have his little ‘woe is me, I’m questioning Daddy’s orders’ one-sided chat with Castiel, but whatever had happened, Sam was now seemingly Hell bent, pardon the pun, on uncovering each and every one of Dean’s unexplored transgressions in the pit. 

Now, in another motel room in another town, they slept that night in a, thankfully for Sam, double Queen room, surrounded by the tropical plumage of toucans, parrots, kingfishers and various other birds of paradise printed, pasted, strung, stuffed and woven into the room’s wincingly bright accommodation. Even the damn handles on the doors were carved into the shape of bird’s beaks, sharp and unforgiving jagged door knobs that left you with a fistful of splinters every time you dared touch it. 

They used grease stained ammo rags usually put aside for wiping diesel and gunpowder off noir roughed fingers and had thrown them on top of the offensive knobs, had sacrificed their provisions instead of their skin for once and had dealt with the disruptive cuckoo that threw itself out of the unmatching and extremely annoying clock mounted on the wall, had barely avoided shooting it when it had launched itself with a scream at Dean as he’d walked, unaware and bone tired, toward the bathroom on the stroke of midnight. 

Sam had smothered a laugh in a well-placed and totally unconvincing cough and Dean hadn’t had the energy to bring him up on it, had just scrubbed himself down with the bracing cold water the sink faucet offered and then delved fully clothed and booted onto the bed spread nearest the door, had grumbled at Sam to do the salt lines seeing as he’d driven his traitorous sorry ass there, and closed his eyes, welcomed in the darkness and solitude of sleep with the aptitude of a man begging for peace whilst his innards leaked putrid and bloody with the tenacity of his sins. 

The blasted cuckoo clock woke him up at dawn, it’s cawing gurgle of a speaker box and it’s crunching grind of well worn and most definitely unloved gears, jerking him out of his Hell fire nightmares. It’s unordered hooting jolted him into upright half wakefulness and into the bruised blue light of morning, blue because of the aquamarine net curtains that hung fly dotted and bedraggled against the window pane, decorated with clear vinyl stickers of parakeets, humming birds and for some reason, one lone duck billed platypus, webbed feet and unhinged gaze staring at Dean as he groaned broken and exhausted into his palms, heard Sam complaining ever more loudly somewhere off to his right as the damn bird cycled for the fourth time through its cacophony of unmelodic wake up tweets.

“Shut it OFF!” Sam groaned, pulled one pillow sloppily over his head and threw a second across at Dean, refused to move even when Dean threw the sofa parasite back at him, shouted ‘HEY!’ and kicked his brother’s slim toned freakishly long arachnid leg where it dangled off the side of the sunken mattress. 

“YOU shut it off, BFG!” Dean growled, kicked his brother harder and swerved when Sam swung himself upright to a sitting position.

Sam’s hair, in dire need of a wash, oily with sweat and most likely PMS hormones, stuck up in aggressive clumps about his head, looked as if he’d been dragged backward through a hedge and then electrocuted for good measure. His baby brother scowled at him in perverse hatred, the tinnitus ring of the cuckoo clock swallowing every other sound in the room like a vacuum and making Dean feel sea sick, like he’d looked too hard into one of those kids kaleidoscope toys and had somehow got sucked into its psychedelic, ever rolling, inner sanctum of rainbows and glitter.

Dean winced as the cuckoo suddenly seemed to speed up, somehow decided its terror wasn’t grand enough and upped the ante, wouldn’t be satisfied until honeyed gelatinous fluid leaked from their ears and they begged and pleaded it’s phony wackadoo conglomeration of bird sounds and wires to ease it’s torture. 

“You’re such a DICK!” Sam yelled snappishly, stood up, strode over to the vibrating offensiveness of the cuckoo and, with no pre-amble, reached inside the clock’s inner sanctum and ripped out its gears, pulled out wires and switchboard and soundbox and thunked them unceremoniously on the patchwork carpet of palm trees, parrots and guavas. 

Silence suddenly pressed ominously against Dean’s ears, made him feel as if he’d just bound himself up in bubble wrap, was ten layers deep inside a protective shell of his own devising and couldn’t tell up from down, left from right or even night from day. It was horrifically unerring, and it made his skin crawl, made him look up at his brother with eyes flared wide in momentary uneasiness, _say something, anything, please don’t let me think about it, gotta fill the silence somehow otherwise that’s how it starts, gotta keep on moving, gotta keep talking, gotta keep the music playing or they find me, the screams, the howls and the begging, the sobs as they pleaded with me to stop, to please spare them, but I never listened, never let up, couldn’t do it, couldn’t go back, couldn’t see what Alistair made me for even a second longer, couldn’t spend an eternity seeing you get hurt._

“Dean?”

Dean blinked, his eyes coming back into focus and taking in the fact that suddenly Sam was right before him, had crouched down in front of where of where he sat on the edge of his adopted bed, had put his gentle and forgiving hands, albeit unsure and tentative in doing so, on his kneecaps.

He glanced down at where their bodies met, wondered what it would take for Sam to want to touch him like that when it wasn’t to gain reassurance or support, wondered if there was ever a part inside his brother that wanted like he did, that morphed and manipulated every touch into something more, that sobbed broken and needy inside, that wanted to be wanted so badly but knew it would never be shown the light of day.

“You spaced out, you alright?” Sam asked, moved one of his hands gingerly up to shake Dean’s shoulder, pressed his thumb and forefinger in either side of his shoulder blade and squeezed them together like he was trying to pulp a grape. 

If Dean was a grape, he would’ve let Sam squeeze the juice out of him a long, _long_ time ago.

“Yeah” Dean said sharply, looked away and rolled his shoulder to nonverbally tell Sam that he was pressing too hard, let loose a punched out breath of relief when Sam eased up on his Michelin Man grip.

“M’fine, just-“

“Nightmares?” Sam suggested, looked coy and knowing when Dean looked at him, his eyes wider than their usual stance and his eyebrows doing that tell-tale dance of ‘who me? I know nuthin’ about his high and expressive forehead.

“Sam” Dean sighed, shifted forward on the bedspread and swatted his brother away with the back of his palm, signalled that he wanted to stand up and simmered with annoyance when even when he did stand, Sam kept his feet firmly planted a hairs breadth away from him, forced him to crane his neck up look at his mile high face.

“Move” he demanded, pissed.

“Come on, man” Sam went straight for persuasion, dipped his voice in honey and sugar and wafted it around him like Dean was some damn fruit fly, knew that he could snag his brother and clip his wings if he played the game just right. 

“No, ‘ _man_ ’, drop it, look, I get it, you wanna play therapist, but I’m not in the mood. I need coffee, or bourbon, whatever comes first.”

“That’s entirely my point, Dean!” Sam sidestepped when he did, used his physicality to block him, honest to God puffed out his chest like he was some wannabe Thundercat with the way his pectorals strained against the soft worn fabric of the tee-shirt he’d slept in.

“You’re drinking, you’re angry, you’re turning down _sex_? I mean come on! You can’t expect me to not believe there’s something going on!”

“So, you’re saying because I didn’t wanna bang busty Sheila at the Planetarium that I’m, what? Losin’ it?”

Sam expelled air noisily out through his nose and glared at him.

“ _No_ , Dean, I’m saying you’re having nightmares every night, you go out to bars, stay out til’ 6am and then drive 12 hours straight after, you’re not sleeping, you’re erratic, you’re keeping minis of jack in your pockets and chugging them when you think I’m not looking like some- some suburban house wife drowning her sorrows while she waits for her husband to stop cheating on her-“

“Cheating? Who-“ Dean began, spluttered his disbelief into the air when his brother willingly correlated his hell trauma, the torture that had been very much related to him, with the notion that he was drinking his pain away because of, what? Sam and his escapades with Ruby? Did that make him Sam’s wife?

“And the worst of it” Sam continued, oblivious to his brother’s brother-husband meltdown “is that you’re keeping me out, you’re not letting me help you, you’re lying to me-“

“Oh, you wanna talk about _lying_ now, Sam?” Dean retorted with a scoff.

“You wanna talk about keeping secrets? About your late-night phone calls with Ruby? About the way you’re practically foaming at the mouth to use your damn demonic voodoo powers again?”

Sam blundered, frowned and shifted, on edge, caught out “I’m not- that’s not the same, I’m trying to help people-“

“Spare me the TEDtalk, Sam” Dean cut him off, scoffed once more at his brother’s insistence at clarifying his actions.

Sam fumed silently, opened and closed his mouth several times before leaping back out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“That’s not the point here, Dean! The _point_ is you’re turning into Dad! The way you’re drinking, the way you keep everything inside? just let me in! what’s the worst that could happen?”

Dean shook his head, tried to duck under Sam’s outstretched arm he’d thrown out in exclamation and growled in warning when Sam grabbed him roughly to keep him where he was.

He snapped.

“What’s the worst that could happen? I went to _Hell_ , Sam! We’re not talking a bad day here, we’re talking years of torture, _years_ of it, and I can’t- I can’t, you can’t ask that of me, man, I can’t relive that. I won’t. So, yeah, maybe I’m drinking, maybe I’m keeping you out, but you don’t wanna be in, Sam! you don’t wanna see how I deal with the crap that’s in my head without a drink in me, I-I need to…to keep it in!”

Sam’s jaw ticked, his weight shifting from foot to foot as he took that in, suddenly pierced Dean with intensely kind, empathetic and gently probing eyes, took him off guard by the sudden dismissal of his anger, by his drastic shift from frustrated and fuming to open and indulgent. 

“Years?” Sam repeated, asked hesitantly, watched as Dean swallowed down a curse, realising his mistake a moment too late. 

“It was years?” Sam asked again softly, looked like he’d been kicked in the teeth, his eyes suspiciously watery as he tried to strip back the layers of defensive protection Dean had hidden himself in.

“Yeah” Dean allowed slowly, looked down and away when he heard Sam inhale shakily.

If Sam thought that he was going to suddenly wax melancholy and emotional about Hell then he was wrong, he’d slipped up and revealed the longevity of his stay in the pit, sure, but he wasn’t about to grab a cushion and a bong and invite Sam into the sharing circle, not now and not ever. Sam didn’t need to know what he’d done, what he’d seen, and if he was turning into Dad? It was probably about damn time. He’d been slowly morphing into John for years, had adopted his leather jacket, then his car, and then over time his alcoholism, his loss, his grief, and now his penance for arguing with Sam, for keeping him at arm’s length, for protecting him beyond any shadow of a doubt, for putting Sam above anything and everything, because his life no longer mattered, perhaps had never mattered, certainly wasn’t worth all the effort his brother put in to reinstate its pre-Hell tenor. 

He had been remiss to think that his brother hadn’t noticed the liquor, hadn’t noticed his nightmares growing in regularity and fierceness each night that passed. Sam had the eye of a hawk, and Dean was most definitely the mouse he had his greedy gaze on, had him pinpointed to an eighth of a degree, could find him in the dark if he had to. Once Sam latched his talons onto him, he never let go, and this was no different, was only made worse by Sam’s insistence that he need to know what was going on, that there could be no unknown quantities between them when he himself was piling on layer after layer of deceit on a daily basis.

Maybe Dean was whipped, maybe he was tangled up in his baby brother’s web of infidelity and falsehoods, but he was still a man forged in the shadow of John Winchester, an unerring soldier trained since boyhood, a fighter and a general, and he could say no to Sam if he had to, had done it a thousand times and could do it a million more if necessary. 

It made him feel raw, made him feel untethered and at odds with his own soul when they talked to each other like this, when they shoved at each other’s shoulders and barked demands and retributions into each other’s faces, snarled and gnashed their teeth like they could possibly intimidate one another, like they hadn’t taught each other these tactics, like Dean hadn’t raised Sam from Adam and given all of himself to build that kid from the ground up, to make sure the world didn’t swallow him whole before he had even experienced life’s offerings, but for all that it made him feel, and for all that it hurt, Dean was still one stubborn son of a bitch, and he didn’t break easy.

“I’m not talkin’ about it” Dean said finally, broke Sam’s reverent tentative glimmer of hope that danced in his eyes and dashed it against the rock’s of his stern sensibility. 

“I don’t care what you say, I’m not talkin’ about it, you can’t make me.”

Sam let Dean move past him then, let his big brother wander across the faded neon greens and blues, purples and pinks of the patchy hallucinogen carpet below, just stood there, shoulders tense and rounded, head turned to the side as he watched Dean with that unwavering predatory gaze of his. 

Seeing as Sam now knew about it, Dean now felt no shame in unscrewing the cap of his first miniature whiskey bottle of the day, stood with his hand braced on the banana leaf patterned table top of their kitchenette and downed the small alcohol offering like it was syrup.

“So, that’s how it’s gonna be? We’re just going to keep lying to each other?”

Dean turned to look at his brother when he spoke, saw Sam’s mouth pucker and distort when he saw him not even bothering to hide the small liquor bottle he’d just swallowed down.

Dean wet his lips, lowered one eyebrow and raised the other as he tilted his head to look at Sam, felt the flare of security and warmth from the liquor nudge into and immerse itself in his deadened and parched veins “the second you wanna be honest, I’ll be here, but I’m not sayin’ I’ll return the favour.”

Sam looked down to where the wires and gears of the now very past it cuckoo clock lay abandoned and discombobulated on the tropical themed carpet, his eyes darting back and forth between parakeet and toucan and then raising up to take in his brother’s dismantling of another bottle of his amber coloured saviour, watched as Dean closed his eyes and wet his lips before he took in the liquor, drank it reverently and desperately, as if it would solve whatever problem there was inside his warped and shaken psyche. 

“OK” Sam said, wet his own lips in sympathetic retaliation. 

“OK, you don’t have to tell me, but I’m not going to stop asking.”

“I don’t care how long it takes…whenever you want to talk about it, I’ll be here.”

Sam looked so sincere, his whole body poised toward his brother, so desperate and focused that Dean wondered if he even knew he was trembling. Sam was different these days, and he figured it had something to do with his powers, had something to do with the way he could expunge demons from their human meatsuits with his mind. His brother was so agitated nowadays, was quicker to anger and leapt to defensiveness in a heartbeat, still did the job and rolled his eyes in the allotted time he was given to air his grievances over Dean’s eating habits or lewd comments, still showed compassion and empathy as was his second nature, but he was now so blatantly overshadowed by whatever demonic crap Ruby had roped him into, that Dean never truly felt like Sam was fully there. 

He was committed to the hunt, to finding Lilith, to the Angels and even to Dean, but his focus wasn’t anywhere that Dean could pinpoint, not anymore, was somewhere beyond the horizon, clinging to the craggy slippery cliff face of whatever he’d got himself entangled in, whatever inhuman practice he’d embroiled his tenacious soul to. Sam had willingly slipped out of Dean’s adherent hands and had indoctrinated himself into whatever power-hungry scheme he and Ruby had cooked up, had purposely left Dean out of it, had kept him stranded, a murderer denied his pound of flesh, had demoted him from the number two spot and expected him to wait dutifully by as he tarnished his morality for the sake of blood thirsty and outdated revenge. 

It wasn’t worth it. Dean hadn’t been worth it then, and Lilith wasn’t worth it now. They wanted to avert the apocalypse, of course they did, but Sam’s bull-headed mission to maim and kill the leader of demons, to separate the gristle and muscle of her powerful head from her malevolent body, it went way beyond a simple desire to avert the end of times. No, it wasn’t about that, it was about Dean, about Sam’s inability to stop him from going to Hell, because he’d left it too late the first-time round to play buddy cop with Ruby and therefore forfeited his right to avoid failure before Dean’s time was up. 

Sam would never have won, even if he had miraculously killed Lilith six months prior, it wouldn’t have changed things, the only thing that would’ve been different would’ve been that they would’ve shared the evil lick of hell fire as it scarred and burned the skin off their sacrilegious bones. Sam would’ve dropped dead from worming his way around the parameters of Dean’s crossroads deal and Dean would’ve been Hell hound chow either way, had a debt to pay sealed by saliva and blood, wouldn’t have wanted to live top side anyway without Sam by his side.

It wasn’t worth what Sam was doing, the demonic mind power tutoring and the obvious anxiety that invoked, it wouldn’t have been worth it pre-Hell and it was fruitless now. They were better off taking on Lilith the old-fashioned way, through lore and research, through finding the weapon that would get her demonic smoke chugging its way outta her meat suit and back to Hell, or wherever demons went when they well and truly bit it. They could do it if they worked together, if they dedicated themselves to stopping the seals from breaking, but Sam was a blind man on a mission, a man lost in his own self indignation, was punishing himself for things beyond his control and wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, wouldn’t be able to get the retribution he so desired until he saw the waspish poisonous light leave Lilith’s ever changing eyes.

Dean shook his head minutely to himself, rubbed his fingers over his lips as he pressed and sucked them into his mouth, swallowed down the way he wanted to beg Sam to stop, how he hurt immeasurably with the way his baby brother, his reason for fighting tool and nail, the other half of his soul, denied him the duty that he had been born to enact. Dean Winchester had been born to a purpose, knew he was supposed to look after his little brother beyond any shadow of a doubt, was mean to have his back, to be salvation and his damnation all at once. Now he was stripped of his position, was being purposely demoted, and he was barely holding it together.

How Sam expected him to bare himself, emotional and raw, when he was barely functioning on a fundamental human level, was beyond him, was asking too much and would be the figurative and literal death of him if he was pushed to that extreme. 

“Get ready to be disappointed” Dean said finally, looked at Sam with mirth and stoicism and resigned himself to the hurt and nonunderstanding desperation he saw on his brother’s face.

“I’m gonna have a shower. We can hit the loony bin after breakfast.”

Dean kept his gaze downward, found interest in garish tropical print and suspicious brown red stains beneath his boots as he grabbed his duffel and emptied grimy and sweat stained tee-shirts onto the bedspread, searched for anything that didn’t scream laundromat or prison facility. Eventually he found a plain black tee that was just the right side of stagnant and a pair of reversable boxer briefs, having slept in his clothes the night before, made his way across the early morning terror of tropical plumage coming to life, made use of their grease-towel system to avoid even more splinters than the ones he’d acquired when trying to use the bathroom at 2am, and disappeared quickly inside the aqua blue monstrosity of a washroom.

Loony bin referred to the reason they were in that Podunk town to begin with, had started with a sudden visit from Sam’s demonic gal pal BFF that had caused them to lose $500 on what should’ve been a simple in and out pool game hustle, and had ended with the newly acquired knowledge that somewhere, somehow, there was a girl escaped and on the run from all Queen Lilith and her demonic horses, who had been locked away in a mental hospital because, or so she claimed, she could hear Angels. 

Dean hadn’t believed it at first, as was his MO with most things hinky and unforeseen, had tried to argue away that Anna was most likely some demon who’d got some juicy Angel intel, someone who’d slipped out the ranks and was now Hell’s most wanted. But as Sam had researched, had found the girl’s family and her Christian upbringing, had proven her humanity with just a few well aimed clicks on his web browser, the reality of their next case began to hit home.

Demons were out to wrangle some dew eyed girl, some innocent who was wracked by visions, by voices of Angels, and God knew what else, wanted to take her and prod and poke her with sticks, see how she worked and torture her to divulge what she knew. She was either a mouth piece for the douchebag Angels or a flint in some demonic assholes pocket, and either way she was screwed. It made him think of Sam, of how his brother had been marked for glory by Hell and execution by Heaven, how he had been strung between two extremes, a religious fanatics worst nightmare or perhaps their most greedy and wanton dream.

Sam was just like this Anna girl, torn apart by human desire for normalcy coupled with the horrific duty of being a one stop shop for all that was gruesome and archaic about the two halves of religious faith. Neither one of them had had a choice, and if this girl was hearing and seeing the pay off of whatever messed up apocalyptic shit the two warring camps of evil and evil-in-a-righteous-tan-pantsuit were planning, then she was no different than Sam with his psychic premonitions. She was young, confused, and without the benefit of hunter’s knowledge and knowhow, didn’t have someone like Dean there to protect and look over the sudden new and terrifying changes happening to her. 

So maybe it had just got personal, and as much as Dean didn’t want to go anywhere near an Angelic homing beacon or some personification of demon-fly paper, he couldn’t shake the feeling that as much as he needed to steer Sam clear of his heavenly home boys, he needed to see this Anna girl for himself, needed to know her story and see in her that same innocence and naivety that had recently dissipated and made itself unknown in his ever changing and darkness flirting baby brother.

Sam didn’t get to respond before Dean shut the bathroom door on him, didn’t abide by their usual 2cm rule that had them never fully closing doors in case some pissed off spirit or revenge bent monster suddenly apparated into thin air and got the jump on them, Naked and Afraid style. 

Dean knew that his brother had a lot to say, had a lot of grievances he wanted to air and a lot of rebuttals to Dean’s stern dismissal of his concerns for his mental health. The thing was though, there was never time for them to dream journal or see a therapist, never time to indulge in self-improvement and self-love. Instead, they were always in a constant to and fro with their egos, with their sense of duty to the job, and to each other. 

They were skating a knife edge by ignoring their own needs, were skimming their knees and hissing as sores and blights ripped open and oozed grimy and putrid, unable to talk to one another and drowning in their self-isolation in their shared world of two, often mixing their inability to cram any more denial and objections down their gullets and exploding into a festering mess of broken tears and screams. 

They didn’t have the luxury of self-help, but they could help each other, and that had to be enough. But in this reality, in the place they were living in now, that space where Sam was cheating humanity by using his misplaced powers, where Dean was swatting Angels away left and right and where the apocalypse, hell memories, and more demons than they’d ever seen in their lives, pressed in on them from all sides, the concept of inner sanctity and feelings hour was down right laughable. 

Dean undressed sluggishly, thought about Anna Milton and her heavenly plight, thought about Sam standing conspicuously on the other side of the bathroom door, shifting heavily enough with his gigantic bear feet and listening to every move that he made, too proud to say he was clingy and too stubborn to let his brother shower in isolation.

As if it knew its name sake was nearby, his soulmate mark flared up in righteous indignation, bristled and fizzled so angrily that Dean took his watch off to give it a rugged scratch, felt anxiety and relief flint against each other and spark nausea in his stomach. There was a wicked tan line where his watch had been and it looked ridiculous, stark white skin framed by darkened sun kissed forearm, his veins half bleached where they began underneath his palm and travelled down to sunnier pastures down his arm. 

Sam exhaled slowly, softly, outside the door and Dean immediately clenched his free fist over his mark in retaliation, didn’t want even the thought of the mark to taint the air that his little brother breathed into his single and unvilified lungs. 

He shoved his boots against the skirting of the door and the wall, allowed their laced and metal stuffed weight resting against the door stop Sam’s tendency to open it mid shower and felt the action slowly begin to settle his flighty nerves. The bathroom around him was a horrific mash up of Bugs the movie and a continuation of the tropical fauna theme that had been prolific in the main room. Brightly coloured beetles, butterflies, fruit flies and dragonflies covered the room’s top to bottom neon blue wallpaper whilst the bird themed appendages, towel racks and cabinets with billed handles, squawked at Dean as he trudged his way over furry bath matts shaped like giant tropical slugs, complete with googly eyes waggling their way around on deflated stalks and the appropriate amount of ooze sludging its way out of their worn and unwashed bodies. 

The shower head was a swan when Dean finally made it underneath it, was a goddamn white regal King asshole of birds squatting atop the shower head, its body enveloping the metal so its webbed feet rested either side of the spout. What a swan of all things had to do with tropical theming he did not know, and as he turned on the water and waited for the hot water tank to churn to life, he realised a moment too late just how the droplets would expunge themselves from the bird’s ass. 

As if waking up to a cuckoo’s horny for pain cries hadn’t been enough, he’d now just showered in the liquid swill of a Swan’s taint and, upon further horrific realisation, lathered himself up with a way too perky and accommodating bar of Duck Ointment soap.

By the time he’d scrubbed himself raw with towels he daren’t look at too closely, Dean was more than ready to get the hell out of Dodge. 

Bring on Anna, bring on the Angels, just don’t let him look at another bird’s anus ever again. 

=

It hadn’t been lost on Dean that it could’ve been some plan of Ruby’s to get them involved with Anna, although when he’d dissected it and given it further thought, he couldn’t find a reason she of all people would want his brother near the Angels she seemed to fear so much. Dean knew she wanted Sam to keep on with his mind power, for reasons beyond him, and he didn’t believe a twisted and damned soul could care that strongly about something if there wasn’t something to gain from it, and so for her to deliver Sam into the hands of those who hated her and, as she knew, hated him more, would be counterfeit to her hopes and dreams for their good cop – bad cop routine. 

Dean wished he knew what her end game was, because he didn’t believe it was Lilith, couldn’t just be wiping some hot shot demon off the playing board, wouldn’t be worth all the anguish and the trials and tribulations that came with his brother’s constantly shifting morality crisis. No, he didn’t trust Ruby one bit, didn’t trust her dewy-eyed intense gaze when she looked at his brother, didn’t trust her leather jackets and skin tight jeans, her dry sarcasm and wit, a futile attempt to replicate the look and attitude he’d already adopted and trademarked before she was even a whisper of black smoke in the canker sore that was Hell’s loins. 

He didn’t trust her intentions but he could trust enough to know that she for some reason needed Sam, wanted to utilise him for her own means, and that meant that the last thing she wanted was some Heavenly douchebags screwing things up. It also meant that he had no solid tactile reason behind his grudge when she turned up and monopolised Sam’s attention in an instant. 

He’d been furiously jealous and antsy the whole drive afterward, had felt mighty and perverse rage thunder through him in waves, was irritated beyond belief that his brother had just thrown everything aside, even their disposable income, to rush to the side of some two bit demon. The betrayal strung the most, really, and maybe, just maybe, he knew it wasn’t about Sam throwing away some easy cash, wasn’t about his brother blowing a game of pool, or even about Ruby being a demon.

If he was being honest with himself, and he wouldn’t be, he knew it was because Sam hadn’t chosen him. But he didn’t want to think about that.

They visited the hospital Anna had been a short term guest at and had seen her drawings, dark gashes of smudged and wild crayon over flyleaf that predicted the breaking of seals, the coming of Lucifer and the warnings of Angels scouring the skies above. She was obviously unhinged and desperate and Dean felt his anxiety kick up a notch, his apprehension at what was coming for them amplifying. 

They’d followed the breadcrumb path provided by Anna’s medical report to her parents’ home and had found their bodies, lifeless husks contorted in surprised horror, the stench of sulphur burning their nostrils as they picked through the wreckage of the Milton family home. Sam, usually observant and tenacious with going through crime scenes with a fine-tooth comb, took no time at all in matching one of Anna’s waxen drawings to a photograph of her now destroyed happy, and extremely religious, family standing in front of a typical well-to-do church, the colourful stained glass of it’s generous oval window replicated in Anna’s scrawl.

Everything was moving too fast, time hightailing it’s way along and sending them careering down the one stop track to Anna Milton, Hell’s most wanted. Dean wanted to turn the Impala around as they drove to the church, was torn between wanting to help this girl and wanting to barricade Sam inside their tropical monstrosity of a motel room, furry bathroom slugs bedamned, just to avoid the possible eventuality of another Angelic showdown that could further shatter and demolish his brother’s wavering faith.

As it was though, he didn’t, of course he didn’t, this girl was wanted by demons, a known commodity for the Winchesters, perhaps an even more intimate one for Sam due to his dalliance with Ruby, something he didn’t want to think about in any way whatsoever, and therefore he had to remain calm, had to shove aside his complex emotions about how buddy-buddy they’re suddenly getting with inhuman and immoral beings and just get the job done. 

They parked outside the Milton’s church with ease, found it devoid of parishioners and purpose. They scoured the main church floor and when they found it empty except for a claw footed vat of holy water and triples of well worn and loved wooden pews, they decided to descend the winding staircase that would take them closer to the stained-glass window and with any luck, Anna. Guns primed and ready for action, Dean’s pearl inlaid Colt and Sam’s opalescent gripped Taurus leading the way, they clambered into an expansive and airy attic room, the median of which supported by light brown beams that they ducked around as they stepped in closer to the refracting-coloured light of the church’s picture window. 

“Anna? Are you here?” Sam called out, kept his pace a breadth longer than Dean’s as he looked around the dead air of the enclosed space. 

“We’re not going to hurt you, we’re here to help you, my name is Sam-“

A scuffle and then suddenly a girl stepped out from behind a sun dappled beam, her striking red hair set aflame by a dappled ray of sunshine that caught her as she revealed her hiding spot. 

“Sam? Not Sam Winchester?” she asked, her voice gentle and naively trusting, her delicate white trim top and her branded unfrayed jeans giving her a well-to-do air of innocence and misplaced worldly optimism. 

It was the same aura that Dean had found accompanying his brother when he’d reunited with him at Stanford.

“Uh-yeah?” Sam questioned, glanced at Dean before lowering his gun as Anna took three steps closer, her face as unafraid and bright as the morning sun as it crested the horizon.

Anna turned this luminosity on Dean next, her molten hazel eyes, another reminder of her duality with his brother, set on him with intense and awed reverence. 

“And you’re Dean? _The_ Dean?” She asked.

Dean felt Sam shift uneasily beside him, his own gun having been lowered in natural deference when an innocent, no matter her unpredictability, had come unerringly close to the barrel. 

“I guess you could say that” he shrugged, sheepish and smug all at once, tongue teasing his teeth as he perversely enjoyed the enamoured hero worship glimmer in her eyes.

He probably would’ve enjoyed it a lot more if it wasn’t for what she said next.

A broad unfiltered smile took over Anna’s lips and she did a small toe to heel rock in subdued excitement, her hands swinging up to clasp together in front of her chest, a chest that Dean noted was barely covered by a low buttoned camisole, rather risqué for a devote church goer but he wasn’t complaining. 

“It’s really you! Oh my god!” she gushed, couldn’t help the words as they poured out her mouth “the Angels talk about you. You were in Hell and Castiel pulled you out, and some of them think you can save us-“ 

Dean’s five seconds of fame shrivelled up and died in his chest, his lungs constricting and his tongue turning to sandpaper as Anna paused, glanced at Sam and then said, lower, embarrassed and uneasy-

“They talk about you all the time lately. I feel like I know you.”

Dean bit back the sudden acid reflux that gargled it’s way up his throat, the metal of his inscribed weapon squeaking as his ringed finger squeezed it too tight. 

“So…you talk to Angels?” he asked carefully, distrustfully. He took a pointed sidestep and blocked her direct access to his brother, made himself a human shield and heard Sam huff disjointedly, annoyed at his overprotectiveness, behind him. 

Anna stammered a laugh and tucked a flyaway red hair behind her ear, ducked her head and smiled in the same way Sam did.

“No, I wish” she said wistfully, actually sighed before looking at them once more. 

“That would be- that would be amazing, but uhm, no, they probably don’t even know I exist. It’s not that I talk to them just- that I…overhear them.”

Behind him, Sam wet his lips, an audible enough sound that Dean cringed with sensory and stimulatory overload. 

“You overhear them?” he asked.

“Yeah, they talk, and sometimes I just…hear them” Anna touched her delicately veined temple with her fingertips “in my head.”

Dean eyed Anna’s pale forehead sceptically, wet his lips and thought of how Sam’s supposed psychic premonitions to help save people had turned out to be a far deadlier and much less wholesome phenomena than he’d first hoped for. 

“How do you know they’re Angels?” Dean asked faux casually, felt Sam shift to look at him questionably as he spoke. 

“I mean, voices in your head, talking about me and my brother…could be anything, demons, witches, any son of a bitch whose got a grudge, and believe me there’s a lot of pissed off monsters out there.”

Anna, to give her credit, didn’t look offended, just inclined her head and nodded, a deep dive of her nose before it snagged on an invisible hook and dived skyward once more. 

“Yeah…but they’re not…monsters, I mean, I know its Angels. I just know it.”

“What makes you so sure?” Sam piped up, touched his hand conspiratorially to the small of Dean’s back, his fingers grazing the back of his jacket so tenderly that he almost missed it. 

Dean looked over his shoulder at his brother, his mark sparking underneath the pressing weight of his watch as he saw not the exasperation and petulance he expected to see at his show of disbelief, but reassurance and supportive incredulousness, his lack of faith not immediately shunted aside for once but instead given thought and consideration. 

Sam nodded invisibly at him, a twitch of his slim pinked lips and an incline of his head so inconsequential that it didn’t move a single hair on his dark head. A message to Dean, a union, an alliance, a compromise in their differences in opinion that he knew he didn’t deserve. 

Anna’s willingness to divulge the finer points of her self-proclaimed gift wavered as she saw Sam back up his scepticism, but her faith seemingly won her over the hurdle because she only broadened her stance, lifted her chin and puffed out her chest in defiant objection.

“I know because they say so, they call themselves messengers of God, they talk of His will and they’re trying to stop the apocalypse. They’re the good guys.”

Dean fought the full body grimace that immediately trespassed through his muscles and bit the inside of his cheek, hard.

“Yeah, okay” he placated icily.

“So, these good guys, when did they start letting you tune in to Angel radio?” he deferred.

Much more willing to accommodate this branch of conversation, Anna untensed her shoulders and paused in contemplation. 

It only took her a millisecond before she answered.

“September 18th” she said decisively, looked between the brothers expectantly when Sam inhaled sharply at Dean’s elbow. 

“The day I got out of Hell” Dean supplied for the both of them, stepped back and to the side so he could see his brother’s expression: had gone too long without seeing Sam’s face to feel comfortable.

Sam had his lips pursed, his eyebrows flatlining over the focused darkness of his eyes. He didn’t understand what was going on anymore than Dean did, and it was eating him up. Sam hated not knowing, hated being in the dark, being out of the loop, loved the thrill and intrigue of mystery and the research it entailed but wasn’t patient enough to not be crabby and on edge the longer it took a puzzle to right itself, was even more highly strung as of late, his little summer of lust with Ruby having taken him for a turn.

Anna nodded knowingly at Dean’s exclamation, looked at him with awed reverence that he now realised had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the Angel that pulled him out the pit: the fact he was chosen to be saved. Self consciously he shifted his arm, rolled his shoulder in its socket, felt the press of the still partially risen scar of Castiel’s handprint embroiled on his flesh as it shifted against his plaid overshirt. 

Anna noticed his movement, and her smile softened in understanding. She knew.

“First words I heard – clear as a bell. Dean Winchester is saved.”

“Saved, huh?” Dean said tonelessly, rubbed his hand over his face and up through his hair, tugged on his roots and turned away from Anna to walk in a small semi-circle, needed to get moving, suddenly felt claustrophobic in the small attic space. 

“They saved you from Hell” Anna said, misunderstanding, frowned as if she’d lost something in translation “didn’t they?”

“Yeah, they saved me alright, gave me a one way ticket to apocalypse land. I’m thrilled about it” Dean seethed dryly, got the words out between clenched teeth and a tense, satirical smile, all lips and cheek and no teeth. 

“The apocalypse” Anna leapt, suddenly looked incredibly serious and panicked. 

“The 66 seals, Lucifer rising, that’s got to be stopped. YOU have to stop it!” She insisted. 

Sam stepped cautiously between the girl and his brother, saw the flint of tension in Dean’s eyes and didn’t trust the way he was spiralling, walking in tighter and tighter circles as his anxiety amped up.

“Anna, listen-” Sam started, widened his eyes and putting his hands up placatingly.

Anna looked desperately between Sam and the back of Dean’s jacket as he stalked round the room.

“Anna” Sam said again, forced her to focus at him.

“Don’t worry about the apocalypse. We’re going to stop it; we’re going to stop the seals from breaking and none of that- none of it is going to happen. I promise.”

Sam looked so sure of himself, his nostrils flared in an adrenaline surge that always transpired when he thought of Lilith’s demise, his face open and willing, his eyes betraying none of the fear that Dean knew tore at his insides the same way it did at his. 

Anna frowned, her mouth puckering in confusion.

“The Angels don’t like you. It’s Dean they want. It’s Dean that’s going to stop it. They say…they say they’ve got another plan for you.”

Dean’s circular stalking motion halted in its tracks, his boots stopping so abruptly that they scuffed the wooden floorboards below with an abrasive squeak of rubber.

“What? What plan?” Sam had already asked, looked defensive and pinched the same way he had when Uriel had told him to back off. 

Dean strode forward, gave Anna a wide eyed cease and desist look, shook his head behind his brother, not knowing what she knew but not waiting around to find out. Anna noticed him and faltered, her mouth already parted to explain her singular knowledge, the words caught mid-way out her throat.

“Just-“ she croaked, wet her lips and swallowed, cleared her throat with a small ‘ahem’.

“Just that- they have bigger plans than that for you. I don’t know what they are, they just say that they need you for something else.”

It was the best damn lie Dean had ever heard, and he saw Sam gobble it down whole, saw the way Sam’s faith buoyed itself back up at Anna’s words, how he saw himself in a brand new light, chosen by God, by the Angels, despite the demon blood that coursed through his veins, despite the darkness that plagued him and made him unclean. The Angels wanted him, had an overarching ineffable plan for him. Sam Winchester was wanted, was needed, and that purpose, was all he had ever wanted.

Sam never stopped to realise that maybe, he already had a purpose, that his purpose was to be by Dean’s side, was to be a brother, was to fight the good fight and find joy in diners and magazines and thirty year old cassette tapes. It had never occurred to the younger Winchester that he had already been saved, was already wanted and needed more than Heaven could ever dare to.

Dean looked at Anna and nodded once more, a thank you and an acknowledgement of resignation. Sam had got what he wanted once more, renewed heavenly purpose, and Dean was once again left bereft and alone.

He knew his brother would’ve tried to weasel more information out of Anna if it wasn’t for Ruby suddenly arriving, her presence causing Sam to switch gears from tentative heavenly hopeful to demonic lapdog in under a second. 

“Her face! Oh my god, her face!” Anna yelled, stumbling backward and running into Dean who was forced to steady her, hands gripping her slim boned shoulders securely as she flailed, trying to get away from whatever she alone could see.

“She’s a demon! We have to run!” Anna insisted, looking at Dean bug eyed and hysterical when he didn’t share in her urgency.

“Nice. Real confidence booster” Ruby snarked dryly, rolling her eyes hard and cocking a hip out to the side.

“Why are you here?” Dean asked abruptly, glaring at Ruby with all the hatred he could muster. It was like she lived in Sam’s ass recently. 

“Major big time demon coming, so we’ve gotta move. Now” Ruby explained, looked to Sam and then Dean with reassured self-important know how.

“OK.“

Sam immediately sprung to action, nodding jerkily and grabbing Ruby’s leather clad bicep, pulled her with him into the room and began circling the loft, looking for a way out that wasn’t the stairs they’d come up previously.

“So, you turn up and some hot shot demon just happens to show up right after? Kinda convenient don’t you think?” Dean interrupted, grit his teeth and glared at Sam when he looked at him in furious disbelief. 

“He followed you here from the girl’s house, genius, not me” Ruby said tersely “we can fight some other time, Dean. For now we’ve gotta get the girl out of here.”

“I’m not going with her” Anna immediately rebuts, looks at Ruby’s face and flinches back, makes Dean wonder what horror she was seeing there.

“You don’t have a choice” Ruby says firmly, moves to step forward but is halted by Sam’s grip on her arm tightening.

“Who’s coming?” Sam asks her, voice elevated and agitated “is it Lilith?”

“No. Worse” Ruby responds quickly, looks to Anna again where she’s rigid and immobile in Dean’s arms. 

“We have to go!” She repeats, looks incredulous that the Winchesters aren’t immediately leaping into action.

“Dean” Sam says, suddenly points to a point beyond Dean’s back, his face distorted in apprehensive fear, confused stillness coursing over his features as his muscles begin coiling in anticipation of sudden action.

Dean lets go of Anna and turns, looks to where his brother was staring. There’s a statue, a virgin Mary draped in silken robes, her head bowed and eyes shut as she reverently bestowed her prayer to the cupped gentleness of her slim fingered hands. Blood, black in it’s thick and gelatinous sluggishness, dripped down from her sculpted eye sockets, slid it’s way down her front and pooled with an unnerving ‘plip plip’ onto the sanded wooden floorboards below. 

“He’s here” Ruby breathed, looked quickly to Sam, erratic and uncharacteristically fearful. 

Sam immediately flew to action, worked in conjunction with Dean to hide Anna away in one of the floor to ceiling cupboards that stood at the edge of the attic room, shoved her in amongst bibles and sermon notes and turned back just in time to see a man languidly walking into the room, the smarmiest grin Dean had ever seen distorting his stubbled and gaunt face. 

That horrific twisting of jowl and flash of crooked teeth is achingly familiar, the angle and dexterity of it causing a low and anguished ache to work its way into Dean’s stomach. He knew this demon, somehow, somewhere, and as he meandered forward, confident and lackadaisical all at once, it begun to dawn on him where he had seen that particular gait and bravado before. 

“Sam, you have to use it, do it NOW!” Ruby was yelling, had rushed to his brother’s side and pulled at his jacket in desperation, looked for once as if her terrified insides matched her meat suits outside.

“What? NO!” Dean shouted, clamped his hand down on Sam’s other side, the brush of his palm against Sam’s wrist before he realised how ridiculous their predicament looked, both of them tugging on Sam like he was some damn Christmas cracker. 

“Dean, we don’t have a choice! Sam has to do this or we DIE! SHE dies!” Ruby insists, obviously says enough because suddenly Sam is pulling out of both their grips and striding forward, confident and disastrous and breaking Dean’s heart.

Sam flung his arm up with authority and assured zeal, smirked at the powerhouse demon with a meanness that Dean didn’t recognise on his brother’s gentile features. For a second Dean thought his brother could do it, was so convinced by Sam’s own conviction in his abilities that when the demon smirked and threw his brother down the stairs without even touching him, backhanded him through elemental space like he was an arrogant fly, Dean was too late to step in.

“SAM!” he yelled, sprinted toward the staircase without a second thought, his mind full of _Sam, Sam, Sam_.

The demon chuckled hysterically and the next moment Dean felt that same transformative power that had thrown his brother crash into him, sent him spiralling to the floor, crashing into wooden crucifixes, into folded up bible study chairs. He landed, spread eagle and screaming his pain into the jut of his lower lip, as his arm got caught beneath him, felt the grislily sounding jolt of it being displaced from its socket, the sensation of blood rushing to that disconnected area and then scattering in a panicked surge of pins and needles as it found its pathway blocked. 

“Son of a BITCH!” Dean roared, shunting himself up painfully onto his knees and cursing as he fell slapdash onto the floorboards, one hand shooting out to stop his chin kissing the wood. 

“My my, _language_ , Dean” the demon trilled, grinned sardonically down at him as it slithered it’s way across the room to where he crouched, panting and in pain on the floor. 

“Don’t you remember me? We were such close buddies down in the pit…although I suppose-“ the demon cocked it’s head in mock thoughtfulness, tapped a grubby nailed finger to it’s chin and then let out an ‘aaaah’ of realised breath “-I am wearing someone new! A paediatrician, now isn’t that funny? All that effort to save and nurture infants when their blood is always the sweetest.”

Dean huffed agonised breaths as he watched Ruby grab Anna behind the big shot demons back, watched as Anna went screaming and defiant, from the lock up, watched as Ruby did perhaps the most generous thing she’d ever done, and got the girl out of there. 

“Alistair” he groused in realisation, snapped his gaze back to the mirthful smirk the demon was directing at him.

“Oh, he _does_ remember!” Alistair beamed scathingly “you were beginning to hurt my feelings, Dean. After all, you were my best and brightest.”

“Not anymore” Dean said sharply, yelled out in pain as he lurched himself upward, faltering on his shaking legs and crashing against a nearby pillar, his disjointed arm swinging pendulum like and flabby at his side.

“Dean, Dean, Dean…” Alistair sighed, circled away from him and allowed him the misplaced dignity of righting himself once more, a rare grant of kindness that Dean wasn’t stupid enough to believe would last.

It was then that Sam, gallant and unbroken, surged at Alistair from behind, stabbed him through the chest with Ruby’s Sunday Special knife and then flew to Dean’s side as Alistair looked down in mirthful bemusement at the tip of the jagged illustrated knife peeping out between his sternum and intercoastal muscles. 

Dean groaned in defiant relief as his brother pulled him up, let himself lean momentarily into the heat and sweat of Sam’s embrace before he noted the way Sam looked at the stained-glass window with horrified realisation, looked back at him and then away again as Dean had the same crushing thought. They were going to have to jump. The stairs were blocked by Alistair and Ruby had gone that way with Anna, there was no saying if they were down there still and leading the head torturer of Hell to the very innocent, they were trying to protect was a big ‘no-no’. 

Dean’s shoulder twinged in pre-emptive strain as he felt Sam’s arm wind restrictively round his waist, noted that his brother’s shoulder was bleeding heavily through his jacket and fought the instinct to shove Sam off him and scour him for injury, instead jerked one foot forward and fell into a run, Sam’s awkwardly adjacent hip bumping against his torso as they ran, three legged race style, to the window, Sam holding him up and Dean trying to swaddle Sam in his body as with a bracing grimace they crashed through the colourful refractive glass.

The whoomph of fresh uncontained air hit them and Dean bit back a shout as Sam tumbled away from him, his body knocked sidelong and then spun into a careening cartwheel, his brown hair blown into his eyes, arms flailing for purchase as the ground grew ever nearer. The wind had caught in Dean’s jacket, ballooning it outward as he fell, his legs kicking and his dud arm waving disjointed and unfeeling as he fought to somehow direct the trajectory of his free fall. His eyes streamed, moisture stolen and then replenished in equal measure as below them the roof of his beloved Impala swam into view.

He braced himself for the impact, made one last ditch effort to grab Sam as he tumbled faster and more haphazardly due to his weight and size, and closed his eyes as with a massive grinding crunching SLAM he and his brother crumpled the hood and roof of his Baby. 

=

They somehow made it back to their tropical hell scape of a motel room, Dean refusing to leave his Baby behind, somehow convinced it would get towed or demonically hijacked by Alistair taking it for a joy ride. Dean had driven one handed, practically kicking Sam in the shins to keep him away from the driver’s side door, had made it clear in no uncertain terms that he and he alone would drive his battered and bedraggled sweetheart of a car. Sam had been fuming, had kept leaning across his brother and jerking the steering wheel when Dean, cack-handed with one functional arm, let the Impala get a pinch too close to the verge. 

It had been the worst ride of their lives, Dean rabid with pain and wanting to bite his younger brother’s fingers off, and Sam, bleeding onto the leather upholstery and second-hand driving like no tomorrow, somehow able to be both petulant and demanding even with his arm sodden and wretched with crimson. The Impala’s roof was concave and Sam had had to duck down even lower in the passenger seat, his already cramped legs now doing origami style contortions to fit, making him hiss and swear every time Dean jolted the car or they veered to make a sudden, unprecedented turn, neither of them able to see anything beyond Baby’s one working headlight, it’s yellowed hue barely making head nor tails of the white road markings below. 

Once they’d swerved into the motel parking lot, clipping the wings off a dilapidated blue and yellow macaw that presented the ‘Rainforest Hideaway Motel’, they’d scurried to get themselves out of the car. Dean hadn’t wanted to leave Baby out there in her current state, one eye down and roof pin dropped down in the middle as if a gigantic boulder (Sam) had decimated it, but Sam was having none of it, had yelled at him foul tempered and absolute until with a threatening warning that he would CARRY him into their room, Dean had relented, had stubbornly thrown a tarp over his beloved and stormed into their room, wincing at the kaleidoscope of colours and dope eyed parrots that greeted him. 

Now, finally settled behind locked door and salt line, he paced impatiently back and forth, his arm burning with stagnant blood circulation as he waited for Sam to finish sewing himself up, the hooked needle and gossamer thread of his patch up kit going in and out of his arm staggeringly slow, his brother heaving shaken and gasping grunts of pain as he sutured his own blood tacky and sweat dampened skin. 

“Sam!” Dean bemoaned, grunting in pain as he accidentally brushed against the impaling beak of a mounted and stuffed parakeet on the wall. 

“I’m going as fast- gah!- I’m going as fast as I can!” Sam hissed, tightening off his stitches with an excruciatingly raw tug of thread through unnumbed flesh and snipping the tail end off with non-medical grade wonky ended scissors.

Sam reached out to Dean behind him for the bottle of Jack that he was harbouring, that he had been taking slow drags of down his gullet, and begrudgingly, Dean handed it over, bit back a childish retort of ‘hey, that was MINE!’ as his brother splashed the alcohol over his newly tended to wound, groaned loudly and bit his lip white as he doubled over at the string of make shift antiseptic, breathed hard and panted into the bedraggled and stained thighs of his thrift store denim.

“Okay, okay-“ Sam placated, wasted no time in pushing himself to standing and walking up behind Dean, the heat and realness of Sam’s too close body making him flounder because even through the haze of pain that distorted his reality, he was still able to feel the throb deep in his gut, the feeling that told him how desperately he wanted his brother.

As it was though, he really kinda needed to not lust over Sammy right then, and so he ducked his body down, letting Sam manhandle him, his large long fingered palm over the ball joint of his shoulder and his chest heaving, laboured and exhausted behind him as he counted down.

“On three” Sam intoned breathlessly.

“One-!“

He jolted Dean’s shoulder back into its socket with a horrifically grizzly pop, the rush of sudden retrieved feeling making Dean spin around in a teetering circle as he tried to swallow down the profanities that wanted to burst out his chest.

“JEEEEE-SUS! CHRIST!” Dean yelled, stamped his booted feet aggressively into the floor.

“FUCK!”

Sam let go of him as he wheeled around and Dean went to grab the mostly empty whiskey bottle, downing the remnants of amber liquid and closing his eyes to savour the strong lick of burnt flavour that serenaded his taste buds, that took the sharpness of reality and muffled it enough for him to palate. 

“Guh” he breathed out, a punch of relieved breath clawing the air. 

His brother looked at him quietly, their earlier argument about his liquor consumption tainting the air between them before Sam turned away, his broad shoulders bunching as he discarded his blood-stained shirt, the sharp V of his tiny waist narrowing down from his toned and rounded shoulders distracting Dean from his fuzzy and likely concussed revelry. 

Mouth dry enough to sand paper, he swallowed big gulps of air down in rapid succession, his tongue sticking out and back in as he tried to moisten it in the too dry too blistering tension of the room. Sam, blissfully unaware, shucked a clean white tee on, covering up just as Dean’s eyes began to swan downward to catch the dip of his younger brother’s back muscles as they shifted around his spine, the gossamer glisten of silvered scar tissue nestled between two of Sam’s vertebrae, the mark of Dean’s failure to protect his baby brother when he needed him the most.

All at once, all of his projected wantonness dissipated, his longing to touch Sam’s tan soft skin fizzling out to nothing, only the tang of bitter grievance left behind. He had caused that scar, not literally but figuratively, had been remiss in his protection of Sam, had let him go somewhere alone and unprotected when he had known that things were heating up with Azazel and Sam’s psychic abilities, had known his brother had a target on his back, multiple red blinking dots of focused aim that he couldn’t ever hope to knock out all at once. Sam with a bullseye on his chest whilst he fought tooth and nail to rip apart anyone who so much as breathed wrong near his baby brother, did everything he could but not enough to ensure Sam lived to fight another day.

Dean was still looking at the empty space where his brother’s scarred oblique muscle had been when Sam turned around. Sam took in the glazed and inverted stillness of his brother’s form and cleared his throat softly, the adrenaline fuelled desperation of recovering from a hunt gone wrong now morphing into the well-honed lull of awkwardness that usually succeeded it, slipped into the space where they’d bypassed any and all touching rules, any emotional boundaries, and now had to pretend as if they hadn’t to maintain the silently agreed upon peacekeeping of their relationship.

“Dean?” Sam asked slowly, his tone and reverence not dissimilar to his shaking his brother out of his isolated thoughts that morning.

Slowly, like the unfurling of an animal sleep heavy and subdued from hibernation, Dean’s consciousness began to seep back into him, his eyes blinking sluggishly from hazy to clear as Sam watched, vigilant and apprehensive. 

“You good?” Dean asked gruffly, his voice down an octave and husky from where it had suddenly tucked itself away behind his ribs. 

Sam frowned momentarily, his brother’s immediate concern for his well-being over his own unremarkable in the fact but more disconcerting given their current predicament. 

“Yeah, I’m fine” Sam said calmly, waited for Dean to respond and then huffed a steady stream of air out his nose when no movement or clarification of having heard him emerged from his brother. 

“Dean” Sam tried again.

Dean, awash in his own thoughts, suddenly reared up, his chin jerking upward as if pulled by an invisible fishing hook, his eyes flaring wide and then narrowing as he took in Sam’s angled closeness to him, the way his hands hovered uncertain and tactile, ready to touch if need be but not knowing how much that one touch would cost them both dearly. 

Wetting his lips with an awkward smack, Dean cleared his own throat and looked around, looked at the discarded bloody shirt of Sam’s where it lay crumpled and boneless on the floor, looked at their first aid kit with unspooled cotton balls and antiseptic cream disarrayed. 

“Anna. Is she safe? Have you heard from Ruby?” he asked, rolled his newly recovered shoulder in its socket, focused on the pop and grind of the bone rather than his brother’s aggrieved expression.

“She’s fine. Ruby checked in, she’s keeping her at some warehouse.” Sam replied cautiously, his brows furrowed as he tried to wrap his mind around the tension that suddenly cloaked this exchange of words. 

Words they’d said a thousand times, in a thousand different combinations, but words that somehow now felt disjointed and improper, as if their ritualistic taking care of each other was no longer untainted, another aspect of their day to day now overshadowed by the reality of their dispersing paths, re-sculpted and readministered through the polarisation of their loyalties. 

Dean felt ill, memories of hell, of Alistair, of his malicious torment cultivated to ruin him by using the one thing that was bound to make him break, the one thing that could ever make him beg for mercy, for salvation, coursing through his mind. Memories unbidden and raw were now assaulting him from every angle, the booze and the maladaptation of his overtaxed and concussed mind leaving an open path, a lit highway, through which his one glance of Sam’s soul bargained skin graft had tumultuously let loose a barrage of hell fire in his mind, the core of which was the first torment Alistair had ever administered to him: reliving Sam’s death over, and over, having his body slink down to the muddied earth below, his head lolling on his disconnected neck as Dean shook him, pleaded, begged him not to leave him. 

Memories of a thousand different scenarios, ones where he’d got there early enough to stop Sam from getting stabbed but in his foolishness had got himself stabbed himself, had been the one bleeding out into the bark and rubble of that rundown saloon town before in his murderous heartbroken fury, Sam had given himself up to Jake, had willingly slaughtered himself to be by his brother’s side. 

Memories where he could never stop Sam’s death from occurring, memories of getting Sam safely in Baby’s passenger seat only to look across at him to find a rotting carcass, a blue and grey mangled body swarming with maggots and worms, his baby brother’s eye sockets gouged and rotted, his once soft and shining hair falling out in tufts, his heart, the only part of him that remained redolent and whole, shrivelled to an acorn sized husk. 

Alistair had loved to experiment, had loved to see how many thousands of times Dean could watch his brother die, had loved to see Dean’s desperation and futile hope, had adored how no matter what Dean still tried to save him, still tried to find a way to stop the light fading from his precious Sammy’s eyes, to stop the blood as it gushed, black and red, into the asphalt of a parking lot a mile away from that Podunk horror town. Tried to stop Sam, suddenly pinned like a taxidermy butterfly to the roof of their motel room, from bursting into flames, the drip of his pale molten skin dripping down like noxious candle wax upon Dean’s cheeks, his mouth agape in a mutated scream of terror, alive until the very second the calcium in his bones began to curdle. 

After that the torment had mutated. Once Alistair had got wind of Dean’s mark, his soulmate brand, their time together had taken on a much more ephemeral retrograde, the demonic torturer of souls grinning crookedly with the thrill of such a morally questionable marking, with the knowledge that Dean, his new favourite meat sack, not only came from the lineage of stubborn mule John Winchester, but also lusted, desperate and penurious, after his sweet, caring, baby brother. Had been seared with a tattoo of damnation, a prophecy, had been marked with an aconite sealed love letter from the creator of all, a slap in the face to anyone with half a brain and the decency to live virtuously.

The mark was Alistair’s kryptonite and he had marvelled and edged around it with enamoured and excitable perversion, had left Dean blissfully alone for a full minute, a glorious reprise of 60 long and praise worthy seconds, before he had returned, gleeful and giddy, a hooked carving knife in his grime lined and bloodied palm. 

The mark had been purged from him repeatedly after that, the tainted and jaundice skin of his wrist carved out and discarded only for it to grow back with the erratic grace of a scarab, sinew and tissue remaking itself with the ‘scwhip, scwhip, scwhip’ of a master weaver hard at work, looked mint in box, made anew, before Alistair repeated his torment down to the last slice, finding ever increasing exultation the more times the process completed. His attention span that of a toddler learning object permeance, convinced their foot had gone forever, and then remarkably relieved when it revealed itself only an inch away, the repetition of the sensation of loss and retrieval seemingly unparalleled in its thrill.

From bodily excavation then came the hallucinations that Alistair lovingly created for him, scenes and alternate realities that felt as real as the real thing, the horror of losing Sam and having him turn to psychic mulch in some no name decrepit cowboy town now morphed into faceless, graceless Angels, the shape and substance of which Dean had no reference for having not wanted to believe in their existence despite his mark’s evidence to the contrary. They ripped Sam from his side, tearing him apart and destroying him atom by atom until Dean was left sobbing and screaming, desperately grabbing at scraps of Sam-coloured flakes of flesh and soul as they dispersed through the air where a second before his whole entire world, his amazing, smart, kind and loyal baby brother had stood, had smiled at him and laughed, dimples deep and eyes golden as the waning sun. 

Just as he had never been able to save Sam from Azazel’s game of psychic chicken and the sharp end of Jake’s knife lodged between his vertebrae, Dean could now never stop the prophesized nightmare of his mark from coming true, could never intervene and put a halt to the Angels coming after his brother, stripping him of his mortality and his faith in one foul swoop. 

And while these torments didn’t break him, didn’t get him to beg off the rack and become Alistair’s puppet, his student, there was one torment that eventually did, had been the straw to break the camel’s back, and now, as Dean swallowed down his rotten and God given lustfulness for his brother, he forcibly forbade himself from revisiting it, had no interest in reliving the mockery of that hallucination, the feel of Sam’s lips, soft and adoring, against his, the gentle pull of his baby brother’s kiss pinked lips spread over the sun dappled whiteness of his teeth as he smiled, the way Sam had held him pure and untainted, had looked at him so in love, his hazel eyes refracting beatific hope and wisdom and failing to see that he was a disposable double edged ace in a never ending game of Angelic bluff. 

Back in the present, Dean finally snorted. 

“Great. Awesome. Trusting a demon to look after Girl Interrupted, real solid plan, Sam” he said mirthfully, busying himself by picking up the discarded cotton wads and thread that his brother had left lying about the bedspread, heard his knees crack with the exertion it took to pick up Sam’s dirtied shirt and lobbed at it at him.

Sam caught the shirt deftly, scowled at his brother and discarded it to the nearest trash can, a fuchsia metal monstrosity meant to look like an unfurling lotus flower but more closely resembling a mutilated reincarnation of Audrey II. 

“We can trust her, Dean” he insisted coldly, long suffering temperance creeping into his tone, his eyes narrowing in sceptical readiness of an argument.

“Oh yeah? Says you and what army? the many legions of Hell?” Dean scoffed “I don’t get it man, I really don’t. What is it with her? Why do you trust her so much?” 

He looked away before Sam could answer, didn’t honestly want to know the true reason, couldn’t handle anything remotely hinting at ‘I’m in love with her’ and instead rubbed his hand over his haggard and lined face, grimaced as the potent stench of blood and l’odeur de Sam that clung to his cuticles assaulted his senses.

Sam hesitated, an unusual happenstance when defending himself was involved, and Dean peered back over at him for it, noted Sam’s pensive and pinched expression, the way he shuffled his boots edgily against their chromatic nightmare of a carpet. 

Not in any mood to do much more than recuperate for the miniscule window of time they had before they’d be required to recoup with Ruby the Demon Slayer, Dean bypassed Sam’s halted and deliberating frame and instead went over to run the faucet in the kitchen sink. He scooped slap dash handfuls of ice water into his grime inlaid palm, swallowed down three sputtered offerings and then threw one at his face and one down his neck, scrubbed hard at the salt tacky sweat that had beaded there during their face off with Alistair. 

It was only after he’d returned to his cluttered and mussed bedspread that Sam decided to answer him, washed his hands silently and belligerently in the still running faucet that Dean had left on purposely as a neon hint for his brother to cleanse himself, and then walked cautiously over to perch his toned and tense figure on the edge of the mattress. 

Sam strung his fingers together, tugging at them agitatedly.

“I’ll tell you but you’ve got to promise…”

Sam looked up hesitantly, his eyebrows dancing indecisively above his inherently intense eyes as Dean carefully sat opposite him, his taught shoulder a barrier he darent lower lest he allow his younger brother to bypass the many barriers he’d erected to keep him naïve and pliant, safe from the illogical cruelty of the world. Sam wet his lips carefully, debating the right rounding of vowels and synonyms needed to allow his brother to process what he had to say, and Dean’s leg began to jiggle up and down in anxious expectancy. 

“…promise me that you won’t judge me” Sam finished, inhaled tightly and held his breath, let it get caught deep in his trachea, his shoulders bunching about his ears and his eyes rounded and infantile in his face as he looked at Dean, begged him silently for approval, for forgiveness for whatever he was about to admit to. 

In all the years where he had been subject to his baby brother’s cherubic and manipulative charm, he had thought himself capable of treading the line between push over and stoic and immovable prison guard, and yet, deep down, he knew that wasn’t true. He had nearly always been won over by his brother’s charm and witticism, by his empathetic and pleading gaze and jutted out and remorseful lower lip, something he’d once called a pout only to have Sam ignore him flat out for three days, a horrid and terribly lonely experience that had him tearing at his hair in his attempts to beg Sam to quit it and just talk to him already.

He knew as well as his brother did that Sam needed his seal of approval, needed his inclination to forgive and appraise his actions in order to feel resolute and confirmed in his belief in himself. Sam needed so much that Dean could not give him in that moment: unerring trust, boundless support and a matching lustful passion to sever Lilith’s head from her body that just didn’t exist within him at the moment in time, his innards too entangled with Hell fire and wanton disturbed thoughts about his brother, his soul flayed within an inch of its spectral life yet still flaring minute and luminescent whenever Sam deigned to smile in his direction, a precious, rare commodity nowadays.

Dean didn’t want revenge, he only wanted his brother safe, and he couldn’t pretend that he had any murderous instinct left within him preserved and readied for Lilith’s dear deperature, not when all of his energy was now focused between two camps: keeping Sam on the straight and narrow away from Ruby, and keeping him idle and clueless to the true intent of the Angelic battalion currently trying to recruit him into their Godless war. 

For Sam to ask him such a fruitless question, one that they both new was premeditated by his assured knowledge that whatever it was, no matter how dismal and dark, Dean would give him the benefit of the doubt, was now, at this point, just adding insult to injury. Dean knew however that he didn’t mean it that way, would never maliciously manipulate him the way he had Sam, knew that Sam’s questioning of him came from the same place where all of his performative trauma stemmed from: where his insecurity and his co-dependency writhed and boiled away beneath the surface, where he hid his unexplainable and irrational need for Dean, the one that they both knew existed, but, like with Dean’s own need for Sam, ignored unless it benefited them. 

Sam slipped into his old coping mechanisms like a ballet dancer bracing themselves for the softened yet crushing embrace of well-worn pointe shoes. He needed Dean, would seek it out in the dark every time, and yet he had the intellect and the awareness to know that in doing so he was digging further into his own grave. 

Dean pressed his tongue against his inner cheek and watched his brother faulter, the desperation of an addict seeking out his fix making his jaw tick, a dimple pulling into the soft indent of his cheek as he waited out his brother’s response. 

Finally, he nodded, and Sam’s pauper’s grip slackened and fell away on his grave digger’s shovel. 

“Okay” he deliberated, looked hesitant now he had Dean’s sole focus.

Dean waited him out and Sam, with a gigantic shaky sigh, began. 

=

Dean was gone, and Sam was planning to be soon, couldn’t think of anything but the press of his Taurus, metal cool and sparking tense tremors up his arm whenever he tightened his snugly tucked forefinger against the trigger, teased it, geared the mechanism only to huff out a tainted breath of relief when he didn’t do it, didn’t release the bullet into his wanton and throbbing skull. 

His brother had told him to keep fighting, keep going, and here he was, his eyes red rimmed and discoloured by busted blood vessels, his arms torn to ribbons by indulging in distracting and harm inducing scratching, his body weaker than it had been in a decade, muscles waned to struggling to lift even something as simple and light as cup to his dried and cracked lips. Sam had no intention of seeing through the year, had tried to off himself a dozen times already, throwing himself into hunts without backup, scaring even the nastiest of monsters with his abrasive and rash action, with his uncaring and suicidal attitude as he suffered blows to the head, gashes and cuts to the torso, kept fighting left and right despite multitudes of injuries that should have taken him down and made him theirs for the keeping.

Had even been a nightmarish sight even to himself more often than not, could have rivalled any creature of the night. Had on one memorable occasion fractured his ankle in a dusty warehouse and had walked on the distorted and splintered joint, cold and unforgiving, to shoot a frantic and screaming trio of active heart demolishing werewolves stone dead, overloaded them with silver and walked away like he had just emptied the trash, had tracked down the closest thing to a hellhound he could find and still felt no levity, no karmic relief, once they were immobile at his feet.

His life had been returned to him at the cost of his brother’s soul, and Dean, stupid, reckless, selfless Dean, had failed to see what would be left behind when he was dragged down the pit. Dean had always acted as if Sam was a standalone commodity, as though he wasn’t attached, immovable and needing, to his side, as though because he had left for Stanford there was some sort of off switch for Sam, a side door through which he could escape their crazy tangled up togetherness and branch off on his own whenever he so pleased, no consequences, no strings, just a freed and jubilant smile gracing his lips.

Dean was an idiot, and Sam wished he could tell him, wished he could shove and scold at his brother one more time, could pull him in by his worn and over fabric conditioned shirt and breathe in the homely scent of dollar store antiperspirant and burger grease and shake some sense into him, tell him brokenly and emotively how it wasn’t just him, how he needed him just as badly as Dean needed him, how it had been the best night of his life when Dean had come to get him from Stanford, had saved him in as many ways as leaving for a life of college parties and law school exams had left him bereft and reaching and finding a girl to convince to fall in love with him to fill the void left by the memory of his brother’s touch. 

He had refused to let Bobby help him bury Dean, had been convinced he’d be able to find a way to bring him back, to cheat death, to cheat Lilith, to find some sort of supernatural loophole he could exploit in the same way Dean had done for him. He’d driven with Dean’s shredded and mutilated body in the passenger seat of the Impala for miles, had laid down a ratty threadbare blanket from the trunk and tentatively laid Dean there, had shaken so badly he’d had to hold his wrist steady with his other hand as he closed his brother’s eyelids, hid luminous green behind freckle kissed paled skin, had broken into a sob, fallen forward and rested his forehead against his brother’s and cried, loud and untethered, against the waxy frostiness of Dean’s blood splattered cheeks. 

He’d tried to crawl into his brother’s lap, fighting himself and his awareness of reality, as he’d tried to make himself small, had screamed broken and desperate when Dean’s arms didn’t immediately rise to wrap themselves around him, didn’t move to tug at his ‘princess’ hair or rub a soothing palm against the lower plain of his back, a movement that had always soothed him to stillness as an infant. Sam had ruined his own clothes, stained them black with his brother’s intestinal leakage and splattered organs, had made himself sodden with aged de-oxygenated blood as he’d hugged himself into the shelter of his brother’s concave chest.

He’d tried to drive, had wanted to keep one hand on the wheel and the other on his brother, but found himself trembling so harshly that he couldn’t even get the Impala’s key in the ignition. The last person to drive her had been Dean, the last person to dial the radio, to look across at him and pretend he wasn’t looking too long whilst he sat there brooding and sunning himself under his brother’s attention, was gone. 

In the end he’d had to call Bobby, had scared the older man half to death when he’d seen him as ghastly and red as Dean himself. Sam had let himself be patted down, searched over, his lax and numbed face hanging lifeless from Bobby’s aged hands as they parted to draw his cheeks down to his level. Stood there swaying and null as Bobby saw the smoking wick that was Sam’s life now reflected in his eyes, the flame having been extinguished the second the first Hell-Hound dug its over eager talon into his brother’s giving and loving chest. 

Bobby had let Sam sit next to his brother on the bench seat of the Impala, his face tucked into the bloodied narrowness of Dean’s neck as the elder hunter hooked Dean’s beloved baby up to his truck, secured it to be towed and looked back with a broken and clueless whimper of his own as he saw his youngest adopted son sobbing silently into his eldest’s chest, Dean’s face pale as a sheet, his eyes closed and giving the convincing illusion of sleep if only he hadn’t begun to turn jaundice the longer they kept him there. The amulet Bobby had given Sam to give to their Pa, but that he’d given to Dean instead, hanging down by his silent and lifeless heart, it’s bronzed horns disappearing into the realm of Sam’s shaky fist as he closed his hand possessively around it, held it to his bitten raw lips and cried harder.

Sam had bathed Dean once they’d got him back to Singer’s Salvage, had removed his brother’s threads of clothing as reverently as a man at prayer and lowered him into a warming concoction of restorative oils and minerals, had found whatever he could scrounge up at Bobby’s and used his knowledge of Egyptian mummification to mix and create an ointment of granules, aromatherapy oils and crushed flora, had mixed the grainy and sour smelling accoutrement into his brother’s bath water and allowed his brother to simmer in the pungency of age defying lotion and medicine that wouldn’t do a lick of good to his decaying body. 

Bobby had left him to it, had made no comment when he’d kept Dean’s well-worn watch for himself, had said even less when he’d seen Sam walking around, thin as a whisp, with his brother’s amulet about his own neck. Sam had bound his brother’s wrists, had mentioned something about Dean being sensitive to that area of his body, had garbled nonsensical intonations as he’d readied his brother in jeans and flannel, in iron toed boots and thick walking socks, made him presentable with hair gel and thread, sewed him back together like Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas and curated him so close to life that by the end he was more suited to modelling for a mourning portrait than lying dormant and immobile six feet under.

Sam had lain Dean to waiting with a kiss to his forehead, a taboo between them since he was a child but a grieving luxury he allowed himself whilst his brother wasn’t able to witness or even feel it, had cupped his brother’s head in his sweat slick palms, his thumbs pressing against the fronts of Dean’s arms and his forefingers against the short stubs of his brother’s mousy brown hair, re-gelled and sculpted for the reunion Sam was planning them to have. He’d kissed his brother and had allowed himself no remorse, had bid farewell to Dean with coffin lid and clumped soil, had turned his back on Bobby when he’d tried to get him to stay, to attend the wake he’d organised with other hunters who’d known the infamous Winchester boys, and driven off in the Impala with no more than a ‘he’ll be back’ thrown casually over his reassured and driven shoulder.

Six weeks later, he now knew he had been wrong. There was nothing, no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, no loophole or unsolicited evasive technique he could administer: Dean was dead and he had run out of options, had felt his already tentative grip on reality knock sideways into confounded delusion and then to hysterical narcissism. 

He had nothing to live for, no hope, no reason to fight like Dean had asked him to, had thought his brother had been secretly giving him a coded message, a see you soon Sammy, a hidden message of hope for Sam’s retrieval of Dean’s soul, but now realised that Dean had been saying goodbye, had been putting him first, making him believe there was something, anything, to harbour that hope for, had instilled in him the Winchester fighting spirit and then taken any and all chance of Sam utilising it when he had taken his last shuddered breaths on this Earth.

He had been playing chicken with the loaded barrel of his marbled hand gun for days now, hadn’t showered, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t even left his room except to beg and bargain Dean’s soul back with an uninterested and particularly cocky crossroads demon, the dozenth in as many days, and if he didn’t empty a bullet into his skull in the next day, it would only be a matter of time. 

That was when Ruby had turned up. A stolen body, another excuse, an innocent pushed aside by demonic smoke to make way for her convoluted argument that she could make him strong, could help him get revenge on Lilith, couldn’t bring Dean back but could make the bitch who took him pay and get Sam the karmic lustful revenge he so longed for. He had reluctant at first, had fought her back and forth, had fought her as she’d mothered him into eating his first solid food in days, had fought her when she’d tricked him into showering by shoving him under the shower head and using her demonic knowhow to turn the faucet on. Had fought her when she’d prompted him to drive the Impala, to get used to the feel of leather stitching worn butter soft by his brother’s and his father’s fingers before him under his own, had fought her tooth and nail until, new brunette body in play, leather jacket and give ‘em hell attitude adopted, he’d finally allowed himself to be worn down.

She reminded him of Dean, her music taste, her eating habits, her sarcastic comments, even the way she watched him: that same mix of worry and care, of calculated adoration and protective instinct. He had no idea why she looked out for him, why she’d even care so much, but he needed her in those months after Dean’s passing, had lived because of her insistent badgering that he look after himself, that he avenge his brother and make him proud. 

Unlike Dean though, she was imperiously tactile: she didn’t hold back, she touched him when he wanted her to, hugged him tight in her compact and fierce frame, the press of her black leather jacket making Sam wistful and nostalgic for the press of Dean’s against his cheek. She stroked back his hair when he researched, sent him crooked and knowing smiles, eyes a flint of mischievousness inky brown as she rubbed the knub of her thumb into his temple, worked away a headache he’d developed from trying to exorcize a demon unsuccessfully. Sat with him in diners scarfing down fries, the saltier the better, and swung her legs childishly, boots thwacking against the rumbling washer below her as they waited out the time in an endless parade of laundromats, her nifty fingers rubbing soaking salts into Sam’s jeans as she danced to Zeppelin, hips swaying tantalisingly, as Sam stood there, wanting, wanting so badly it ached, but wanting for all the wrong reasons.

So, when she kissed him, pushed her way between his coltish legs and pried them apart, shoved her writhing body against his and moulded her lips to his neck, to the rise of a mole on his cheek, to the corner of his lips and then finally to their seat, Sam had already been too far gone, had been unable to put up a real show of resistance as she’d whimpered and moaned soft against him, had smelt of greasy diner food and leather, of the tang of gun powder and the sharpness of rock salt, had reminded him again, for the thousandth time, of his brother, had looked at him, eyes lidded, and watched him steadily as she panted:

“Why not? Is it because it’s wrong and bad and we shouldn’t? Come on Sammy, you know you want it, you gotta know I want it too…I want it _bad_.” 

He’d fucked her hard enough that if she’d been anything less than a demonic twisted feral wildcat of a being, she’d have been pleading for him to stop, would’ve been ripped raw with the way he used her, degraded her and cried his pain and pleasure into the scope of her sweat slicked neck. He’d been so far gone, leather under his fingertips, the beloved scent of Impala and easily ignored foreign entity driving him as he used her knife, hidden in plain sight in her belt loop, to snick the soft and pliant skin of her collarbone, had swallowed down her righteous offering of crimson ambrosia like it was mother’s milk as he’d moved inside her. 

He’d got stronger, more dexterous with his exorcisms, had begun saving people rather than racking up bodies, and it had felt good, advantageous, had felt like he was making Dean proud, even though he knew, in a far away and hushed corner of his mind, how his brother would really feel about his extracurricular activities. Whenever he’d doubted himself, Ruby had been there, a smirk, a kiss, a slap to his ass, a comforting caress and a warm body at night. She’d wormed her way into his heart by being just what he’d needed, what he’d always wanted, and as the months wore on, as she became a permanent fixture in his day-to-day proceedings, he let the line between the nostalgic preserved memory of his untouchable brother and the current re-affirming memory of Ruby’s touch, meld together, let them become interchangeable as he got more powerful, more ready to face Lilith, more adept at honing the skill he had been born to, but had learned to shun. 

So, when Dean had turned up, full bodied and beaming, his beatific smile shining upon Sam with the literal God sent grace of Angels behind him, Sam had felt his stomach drop to his knees in terror. He couldn’t let Dean know, couldn’t let him find out about Ruby, about how she was with him, about the way she made her voice husky and deep and moaned ‘Sammy’ in his ear as she pleasured him, or how she kept her leather jacket on whilst she rode him because she knew he needed the familiar smoothness of the fabric between his fingers to be able to finish. 

Ruby had saved his life by becoming his brother, and he would sooner die than have Dean find that out. 

=

Dean let Sam finish his story, sincerely relieved when Sam stumbled and stammered and skipped over his…how do you say it… _alone_ time, with Ruby the demonic housewife, let his baby brother ramble about crossroads demons and burials, how he’d tried anything to bring Dean back, how he’d been ready to empty a bullet into his skull before Ruby had given him another, more active and concentrated focus. He’d listened as Sam openly omitted more than he told him, only revealed half-truths and concealed realism, didn’t even have to squint to know Sam was still lying to him, but it was enough, it was proof of what he’d known all along, that Ruby had an edge, had Sam singing her praises because she’d seen a window of manipulation and had jumped on it the second his brother had got desperate enough to seek an all-expenses paid staycation upstairs. 

Ruby was trouble, but she’d saved Sam from himself, and for that, he had to give her credit where credit was due: she’d sought out his brother and got through to him, God only knew how, and redirected his suicidal ideation back to the core of who he knew Sam was, a hero, a saviour of people, a believer in the good and the just, a man committed to finding a way through the dark when no light could be found. How she’d done it, he didn’t want to know, or he did, burned with it, but he knew he couldn’t handle knowing, and so this…this patchwork quilt of a story with more holes and loose ends than conclusions and bridging arcs, it had to be enough.

He had to take Sam’s olive branch and stick it in between his teeth, play the demure mindful understanding little dove and tread his own path, form his own conclusions of Ruby’s master plan, and put a stop to it before Sam took one wrong turn and the whole flimsy deck of cards came tumbling down.

As it was however, before Dean could even comment, Sam’s phone begun to ring, and Ruby’s Queen purposely stepped back into play. 

Anna was waiting for them at some derelict warehouse and Ruby was getting tired of playing babysitter and so, with an equally intense soul searching stare between them, and an awkward two step dodge round each other to gather their belongings, they left out to the Impala and hit the road. 

Dean put on a soft rock station to fill the eery tense silence Sam’s confession had left in the air between them and after half an hour of gentle melodic strums of drum and guitar Sam was dozing openly against the passenger seat window, his mouth slack and open and his baby pink tongue lolling like an overworked puppy’s as he puffed little huffs of hot air against the rain spattered glass, his face twitching idly in dream induced sleep, his mind his own in a way that Dean hated and loved in equal measure, made him feel shut out and alone and yet intensely relieved that Sam still had enough pliant humanity in him to dream.

Dean hadn’t dreamt anything in months that wasn’t straight out of a Stephen King novel, and even then the master novelist could’ve learned a thing or two from his nightmarish musings. 

=

Hours later and Anna was no longer some humbled plebian with an ear for the holy, but, with the help of their token psychic Pamela Barnes, a bonified fallen from grace Angel. Her temperament had changed, shifted from shaken optimism and religious fanaticism to disillusioned and begrudging hatred for those winged and haloed, for Castiel and Uriel, her disobedient brethren who’d turned their backs on their commander and chief and now wanted her dead for having a mind of her own, for daring to think outside of their prescribed heavenly box of ideals. 

Heaven and Hell were on their asses and Dean felt his growing protectiveness of Anna magnify tenfold. She’d ripped out her grace, had butchered herself and thrown herself from Heaven’s pearly gates with no projected trajectory, no plan, no surety, down to the scrums of Earth, had given a mother a child, a miracle inlaid into her baren womb, and had trod the road the hard way, had run free and rampant as a small child, had bruised her knees and slurped on juice boxes, had gone through adolescence, had had her first kiss, had studied for exams and gone to parties and dances, had had friends and loved ones and a life, a human life, with all the drama and the heartache and the sorrow and the emotion, just for the sake of free will.

In the same way that Sam had defied John and left the path he had curated for both him and Dean to go to Stanford, Anna had also rebelled against her inherited preoccupation and chosen a life free from her father’s rules and regulations, had destroyed any semblance of who she was to become who she was meant to be. Dean knew that if Sam had had the time, had been able to stay at Stanford and go to law school, had been able to worm his way into the California greenery and marry Jess, get a country club membership and practice yoga on the deck of his beachside house, sipping mimosas whilst he did his daily sun salutation and sunned himself to a crisp and even golden brown, he would’ve done the same. 

Sam could’ve had a whole other existence, could have been a whole other person, one whom didn’t have any connection or relation to Dean beyond blood and vague and dimming memories of Lucky Charms, run down motels and the rumble of a classic car’s homely engine, and Dean knew that even if Sam denied it, even if he had assimilated himself to what his life was now, that there had to be a part of him that wished he’d been able to shed his hunter’s skin and step into that of another, couldn’t even be mad at his brother for it because he knew that if could leave himself, he’d do it too.

Back at Singer’s Salvage and utilising the vast and dusty library that Bobby had coalesced over the years, Ruby and Sam had disappeared off to garner some research on the location of Anna’s grace. Pamela had been sent packing and with the God squad nowhere in sight, Dean had gone off to find the newest member of the multi-being group, the girl who’d traded immortality for Funfetti frosting and PMS cramps, and the only person he felt he truly understood right now having lost his token Sam translator card when Ruby had stepped up to the plate, demonic qualifications shoving his brotherly intuition out of the water. 

He found Anna out in the scrap yard, Bobby’s mountains of broken down and derelict cars making jagged and monstrous shadows in the dark around her, the yellowed floodlights the elder hunter had erected on tall metal pillars illuminating the redness of her hair so she stuck out like an ignited match amongst the pitch of the evening’s dusk.

“Hey” he said, cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows openly as he propped himself against the car she was leant against.

Anna smiled demurely in response, closed lipped and serene, her hazel eyes downcast as she watched a beetle scurry its way over the stones and bark at her feet. 

“Hi, Dean.”

“How you holdin’ up?” he asked, pocketed his hands and watched as she sighed deeply, her breath spiralling into the tepid winter air and dissipating just as quickly.

“Oh, you know-“ she sighed “everyone either wants me dead or shoved into a petri dish for experimentation so, I’ve been better. Wish I’d known this was gonna happen so soon, would’ve got myself down to the local bakery. They do an awesome chocolate cake.”

Dean huffed an empathetic laugh into his chest.

“They do pie, too?” he teased.

“Yeah, it’s really good” Anna smiled at him, played into his deflective humour and held his gaze until the lightness of her eyes dimmed and flickered, the Angelic battalion general in her warring with her honed human tendency to make light of a situation to pull through.

Dean wet his lips, let his own smile flatten and dissipate, and tried not to feel as helpless as she must do in that moment. 

“You know…I always watched you. Humans” Anna spoke slowly “I always marvelled at you. You have one shot at this life and its full of…of pain and despair and sorrow and yet…you humans always found a way to make it _good_. You made holidays and traditions and culture and food and _sex_. You made art and stories and- you took what my father made and you made it worth living. You made it fun, free…I wanted that. I never had a choice, I never got to make my own way. I was born to a purpose and the second I questioned it…”

“Yeah” Dean nodded, inclined his head tentatively and waited instead Anna had more to say. When she didn’t, he continued.

“I get it. You wanted out. My brother did the same thing. Didn’t like what our old man had planned for him so he jumped ship, never looked back.”

Anna mulled on that, her head tilting in a way that made her look like Castiel and her Angelic brothers more than she had up to that point. Her slim eyebrows furrowed against her brow and she angled her body toward him, her thin green coat brushing up against the thickness of his blotted brown and age spotted jacket. 

“Your brother? Sam?”

Dean nodded “yeah.”

“But…he came back” Anna stated questioningly, her eyes searching his in the sporadic shafts of yellowed light that picked their green out of the darkened wreckage of the car lot. 

“He came back…because of the mark.” She continued, stated so matter of fact that it took a second for the penny to drop in Dean’s mind.

A second later, he had his gun to Anna’s throat, his body ambushing hers, the solid weight and bulk of his hunter’s physique crushing her empty ethereal shell to the bonnet of the Mustang behind her, the creak of the already rusting metal groaning in protest as he flicked the safety off and grit his teeth, spittle flying as his Sam-centred defences went off. 

“What do you know about that?” he growled, tossed the words out like a barbed lasso and felt immense satisfaction to see the former Angel, for all her commando grace and wisdom and kindness, eye him with something akin to fear. 

“Dean, stop” Anna placated, her voice gentle and yet hitched, her hazel eyes wide as she tried to angle herself away from the unwavering muzzle of the Colt. 

“Dean, stop! stop it, I’m not the Angel, it’s not me! I-“ Anna seized up, her breath catching in her constricting throat as Dean shoved the cold metal of the barrel harder against her trachea, a warning, “it isn’t me. It’s not- I know about it because I-I can sense it. The mark was made by God. I’m sensitive to it but it’s not me, Dean, it’s not me! I’m not going to hurt your brother!”

Dean immediately shoved away from her, his mark burning furiously under the protective sheath of his watch as he kept his gun trained on her, his eyes shunted to slits of untrusting fury, his body a tense line of retaliation. The second he’d trusted an Angel, and this was what he got. The second-

“Dean!” Anna said again, pleading now, “Dean I promise you, I can show you, please! I just want to find my grace, that’s it. That’s all I want. If I could keep Sam out of this, I would, but he’s in too deep already!”

Anna breathed heavily, her thin white camisole shifting as her breaths huffed out of her, her body trembling now and not just from the cold. 

“Please” she repeated “I won’t hurt him. I’m not the one you want.”

Dean processed this quickly, his mind creating and dismissing scenarios in record speed, analysed Anna’s body language and turn of phrase with the psychological vantage point of a trained hunter, a butcher and a researcher, a man born into lore and Latin, a man schooled in calculating percentages of ammo to rock salt and measuring the angle of his gun arm vs the placement needed for a clean and perfunctory head shot. He was smart, often pretended to be dumber than he was, knew he was nothing compared to Sam’s techno computer brain, but still, he knew a thing or two, had watched more Law and Order and read more Freud than he knew what to do with, and when it came to Sam, he’d be damned (again) if he’d let himself Jim Carrey it up in front of a potential knowledgeable hostage. 

“Then who is?” he asked swiftly, darkly, didn’t see the point in denying the mark, or its subject matter, grit his teeth and planted his left leg firmly on the ground lest he need to break into a sudden run. 

Anna pursed her lips uncomfortably, her eyes on the barrel of the gun waving in front of her, but eventually she spoke. 

“I don’t know. They haven’t…announced themselves yet.”

Dean scowled “what’s that supposed to mean? Announced themselves? You doin’ Angelic Debutante’s up there or something?”

He noted the way Anna’s eyes flickered as they tried not to roll, bemused, in their sockets. She pocketed her hands, her fingers turning grey blue from the chill of the night, and toed the bark at the edge of her shoe. 

“No. It just means I haven’t met them. That mark is a prophecy, it makes sense that all the major players haven’t been introduced yet.”

Dean squeezed the Colt between his fingers, turned his knuckles stark white.

“Major players? This isn’t some- some damn _storybook_ with- with characters and plot twists and- alternate realities! This is my _life_ , Anna! This is my _brother_!” he spat. 

“I know” Anna agreed, was quick to affirm, her hands pulling out of her pockets as quickly as they’d gone in, rose them up, palms flat, a show of submission and acceptance “I know, I get it, but I’m telling you the truth- look.”

She reached out for him, her pale slim fingers unfurling toward him and then flicking back toward herself, gesturing, urging for him to come toward her.

Dean smirked, huffed a disbelieving scoff, an abrasive non-verbal ‘oh, please’, and Anna suddenly looked pissed, white hot fury lavishing itself upon her with such force that even he felt the sting of it as it whipped past his cheek.

He stumbled backward as the petite redhead stormed forward toward him, her palms slamming down on either side of the car he’d moronically backed himself up against, her sternum kissing the cooled and prepped metal of his gun and yet showing no awareness of its proximity to her feebly mortal human heart. She shoved a leg between his and Dean’s eyes flared wide, sudden confused arousal spiking through him as Anna took to a move he’d long adopted for getting a girl riding the Slip n Slide before he’d even got his hands inside her panties.

“Woah! Hey!-“ He frantically rebuked, capped the Colt’s safety and scrambled to shove Anna off and away from Dean Jr, his cheeks heating to a toasty terracotta. 

“Just- put the gun away and I’ll show you!” Anna reprimanded, looked at him blankly as if the thought of having sex with him hadn’t even occurred to her.

Pride a little hurt, and feeling more than a little wounded around the ego, Dean slowly lowered his gun. He hesitated and cursed himself, heard his father screaming bloody murder at him for his lax and possibly suicidal readiness, but carried through with wedging the now harmless device into the waistband of his holey thrift store jeans. 

What he was doing, he didn’t know, didn’t know why he’d had such a soft spot for Anna even before meeting her, didn’t know why her paralleled experience to his brother made him such a glutton for punishment, or why he was considering trusting a fallen Angel of all things, could very well be landing himself in a trap for all he knew. Anna was gritty and yet open, was jaded and yet hopeful, and Dean, he really needed some hope in his life right now. He had lost so much, and was in the process of losing so much more, and if he could get one goddamn night’s sleep out of this little underhanded powwow with Heaven and Hell’s most wanted, then damn right he was gonna do it. 

Mark him down as the hungriest hungry hippo; he wanted every scrap of information he could get. Nobody was willing to tell him anything about the soulmate mark. He was running on say so and closed ended answers delivered by a belligerent father, one of those stagnated at over a decade old, and with no new leads, no answers, and the reign of Heaven’s deadliest coming down upon them, he needed all the help he could get.

Maybe he’d end up dead, maybe he’d have to convince Cas to drag him back from the pit for a second time, but at least he’d know. He’d finally know who was after his brother, and he could put a stop to it.

“Alright. Show me.”

Anna immediately looked sheepish.

“I uhm…I can’t. Not without my grace. I don’t have any of my powers like this; I’m just as human as you are. If we get my grace back, then I can show you” her eyes bored into his intently “I promise”.

Dean felt his burst of illogical adrenaline whoosh out of him and his face fell slack where he still stood pinioned to a hunk of scrap metal, Anna’s slim thigh between his, pinning him where he was but not exerting enough pressure to truly stop him if he chose to fight back. Anna was after all, as she had said, still human. 

Anna watched him slowly, took in the way his hand moved distinctly away from his now concealed weapon and let out a shallow breath of relief once he no longer seemed intent on lodging a bullet in her skull. Whatever she knew, he had to know it too, and if that meant scouring the countryside and breaking a few dozen private property regulations to do it then he was beyond down. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t done a whole lot worse for a lot less, and he was no saint, no matter how Sam might look at him when he thought he wasn’t looking.

“Alright” he said “guess we better find you some Angel juice.”

A tentative, shaky smile clung to Anna’s lips “really? You mean that?” she asked, daring to hope but reluctant to dream. 

Dean hated the way she looked at him in that moment, the rounded puppy dog eyes and the doleful sappy ‘you can do this, you can do anything’ hero worship smile that Sammy had trademarked and ruined him for for all eternity twisting her features. Anna clasped her delicate paled hands on his jacket and scrunched the leather up between forefinger and thumb, her body vibrating with thankful desperation as she looked intently into his face. 

“Thank you, Dean.”

Dean watched her silently, curiously, wondered what she saw in him that Sam did too, and then whuffed a dismissal of breath out through his teeth, smiled closed lipped and self-deprecatingly at the floor before he shrugged “anything to help”. 

He startled when suddenly, breaking through their calmed truce, Anna’s hand gingerly found his cheek, the softness of her tendons kissing the roughened palm of his hand as it rose up to cover hers, shocked and emboldened enough by her touch to seek out the root of it and question its intention. 

“Your love for Sam is pure, Dean, and he knows it too. Don’t lose faith.”

Confused green sought out expansion on those feeble words as he watched Anna’s sincere and hopeful expression, and yet no further explanation came. Instead, with a demure and gentile smile, she kissed his forehead with the loving and mothering touch he had often bestowed upon Sammy as an infant, doing anything and everything to soothe his gurgled and hiccupped cries, their father passed out on the spare motel bed and Dean, sugar on his thumb and his thumb in Sammy’s gummy pink mouth as he teethed, crying silently for the matriarch of their little broken family to return to save them from their Hell. 

“Dean?”

Anna and Dean both turned, his thoughts faraway in desolate and peeling motel rooms, Sam’s spittle engrained into the track marks of his skin as the vision of that needy, cherubic babe in his arms, dissipated and reconstituted itself into the shadowy form of his now twenty-five year old brother, as gangly as he was broad, standing under the yellow tinged illumination of a fog light in Bobby’s salvage yard. 

Sensing potential tension, Anna immediately removed herself from her entanglement with Dean, her fair cheeks tinging peaches and cream as she stared hard at the floor and babbled something about the elder Winchester having made her feel better, that she’d had something in her eye, but she was all better now. 

Sam looked fresh out of bullshit, his nostrils quietly flaring and his jaw ticking as he watched Anna separate from his brother, and Dean couldn’t place the expression on his baby brother’s face beyond pissed and potentially dangerous. It was the same look Sam had given Gordon when he’d tried to get all buddy-buddy with Dean and kept calling him ‘Sammy’. Disgusted, bitter, and even a little jealous. 

“You find something?” Dean asked casually, ignored the stab of guilt in his gut as Sam turned to look at him, mouth buttoned up tight and his eyebrows heavy with a disapproving scowl. 

Sam darted a look across at Anna, noted she was still fully clothed, and the tension in his broad shoulders relaxed itself slightly “yeah. We found it, the grace. We know where it is.” 

Dean swallowed down the tacky dryness of his throat, wondered why he suddenly felt as if he was cheating on his brother when he knew for certain that Sam was having regular sermons with Miss Demonic 2008, wondered further if that meant technically Sam had cheated on him first, and cleared his throat loudly.

“Alright then” he nodded, shoved himself forward and strode forward purposefully to stand next to his brother, deliberated before reaching out and touching him, tried not to let his relieved dispel of breath too obvious as he felt grounded once more after having gone too long without being in Sam’s presence.

“Good job Hermyone, you found the source of the ticking noise, now let’s go find ourselves an Angelic pipe bomb.”

Sam rolled his eyes but he also looked appreciative for his brother’s touch, his body tremoring underneath Dean’s fingers, either from the cold of the Salvage Yard or from whatever underlying tension he was ignoring, and Dean moved his palm to lay flat against the nape of Sam’s neck, the brown curls that gathered there lacing through his fingers and kissing his calloused and unworthy senses, the curls the only outward personification of Sam’s softness that wasn’t captured in the hazel of his ever changeable irises. 

“Did you- did you just quote that Harry Potter puppet thing?” Sam asked slowly, laughter shaping his lips into that toothy mouth half open, tongue floppy grin that he did when he found something amusing but darent allow himself the audacity of laughter just yet.

“Damn right I did” Dean sniffed, prideful, grinned crookedly at Sam’s crooked eyebrowed snort of bemusement. 

He squeezed the back of Sam’s neck and dodged when his brother aimed a misplaced elbow to jab playfully into his ribs “alright, let’s go, Hermyone.”

Sam rolled his eyes, put upon, but smiled properly now, his eyes brighter than Dean had seen in days, as he retorted petulantly “it’s Hermione not- _Hermyown_.” 

“Sure, Boy Wizard. Next time you wanna cook me up some frog spawn to go with that sass?” Dean snarked back, grinning widely as he saw Sam’s dimples finally show themselves, winking at him conspiratorially. 

Anna near forgotten as he walked glued to his baby brother’s side like a third limb, Dean now felt his insides churning with anticipation and dread as he and Sam neared the entrance to Bobby’s kitchen and headed toward the GPS co-ordinates and the maps, to the research and the proof of Anna’s Angelic immorality. 

Dean was hours away from finally getting some answers about himself, and for someone who had never cared about that before, he counted it a break through that he was suddenly so invested now. 

The fact that he was only gagging to look into it because the mark related adjacently to Sam, well, sue him, he wasn’t perfect. Caring about himself vicariously through his baby brother was the only way he knew how to live and he wasn’t about to start changing now. 

And as they entered the kitchen and Sam immediately bypassed him to reunite with Ruby, and as he watched his brother’s smile fold itself up and swallow itself down to be replaced with smarmy sensual eye contact and a tight twisting of his jaw as he dragged his eyes over Ruby’s ‘come hither’ look, he didn’t allow it to hurt. Didn’t allow it to swallow him whole and burn him up, but instead refocused his own gaze on the demon who had wormed her way into his brother’s heart and his pants, waited until she flicked her dark sultry eyes toward him and pinned her with a piercing glare. 

He watched as Ruby’s bravado faltered and slipped, watched as it morphed into confused defiance, her hip edging toward Sam as he stood there, a burning chaotic flame, an Angel courting his shoulder and the strength and know-how of a skilled butcher, specialising in demonic destruction, at his fingertips. 

Below his watch, his mark fizzled with anticipation and slowly, he smiled.

Ruby may have won the battle for Sam’s affections, but honey, he was gonna win the whole goddamn war. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is going to be a pretty long slow burn fic with lots of angst and eventual wincest, so buckle up! It's gonna be a bumpy ride. This is based off an idea my friend Lina (linalittle14 on Twitter) and I had about Dean getting a soulmate mark that challenged his beliefs and made his issues with Sam exploring religion so much more poignant. 
> 
> I hope you like! and stay tuned for the next chapter!


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